XVI. THE LAW’S DELAY

Judge Webster Thayer was considering the various motions for a new trial, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was manufacturing automobile license plates in Charlestown State Prison; in his free time toiling at the task of becoming a master of English prose. He wrote an elaborate pamphlet on the Plymouth case, the importance of which, as a preliminary step to the frame-up, he alone had realized. Then his “Story of a Proletarian Life,” an autobiographical sketch, written in Italian, and later translated into English with the help of friends. To Cornelia he wrote, “I have received many praises for it. I must look out to not be spoiled.”

There is a story of old-time New England, how the rebel Thoreau refused to pay taxes to a government which captured fugitive slaves. He was put into jail, and his friend Emerson came to see him, somewhat shocked. “Henry, why are you here?” The answer was, “Waldo, why are you not here?” This anecdote was recalled by an author who came to visit Vanzetti in his cell at this time, and wrote about the case: “Now, as formerly, Massachusetts has its finest soul in jail.” To this Vanzetti replied:

“I understand and appreciate the reasons by which you were adviced to exalt me far above my little merit. If there is a little of goodness in me--I am glad of it--but really I do not deserve your praises (as they are). I think there are some prisoners within these very four walls which exile me from society, which are much better than I.... Humble I wrote for the humble who must conquire the world to peace and freedom; and I try to make plaine humble but ignored truths.”

He studied incessantly, and criticized what he read. “Last evening I read a chapter of the ‘psicology’ (by William James). I perceive at once to deal with a really great one. He speak with simplicity as Reclu and others did. I will learn a good deal from this lecture. I feel the fever of knowledge in me.”

He studied the problems of his own revolutionary movement, and contributed to the anarchist press. “Actually I am overloaded of works. To-day, at noon, instead of eat my dinner I have finished the translation--from English into Italian of a quite long article. Beside that I intend to write the last letter upon ‘Syndicates and Syndicalism.’ I have wrote a historical, theoretic treaty on the subject. I wrote it in epistolary form. They were published--many congratulations came to me--at last the syndacalist replied to me with an article that is a misery.”

He grew still more ambitious; he would write a novel! It was to be a story of an immigrant laborer: as he phrased it, “a story that really happened and has me as a spectator.” “Events and Victims” was the title he chose, and he labored at it incessantly. He was not satisfied with translations made by friends, and rewrote a great part of it in his own English, patiently groping his way through the labyrinth of strange idioms. When the long labor was finished, he wrote:

“I realize, by proof, how hard the literary test is. I have no illusions. I wrote more for exercise than for anything else, and I perceived to have gained something through it by improving my capacity. The fact told had happened. As for the ideas, they are sincere. But the write was spoiled when it happened that an egg, believed cooked, smashed in my pocket outsetting thus my whole nervous system.”

Poor old Bart! Lovable, queer, slyly humorous fanatic, keeping his sense of whimsey, the same in a prison cell as Cornelia had known it in the Brini household, and during long walks on the beach and in the woods of Plymouth! He appreciated the troubles of his friends, who were not great writers themselves, trying to help one who was excessively ambitious. To Mrs. Evans he wrote:

“A few years ago, a good divvol of comrade, felt to have something to say and wrote it down in an article that he sent to the weekly for publication. In the enclosed letter he said to the edictor: ‘I have put down the words: please put down for me the commas and the periods.’ To make that written presentable, the poor edictor almost lost his reason and he wrote to the writer: ‘Next time, if you wish your article to be pubbliced, just put down the commas and the periods that I will put down the words for you.’”

And then the problem of keeping alive, while spending fifteen and one-half hours per day in a prison cell! Bart’s friends gave him advice, and he himself took much thought. He read the edicts of an American specialist in omniscience, and commented:

“Mr. A. Brisbane always trouble me. Several month ago I read in a book of physical culture, that to sit down is an unhealthy habit and that the more one stand the better he feel. I like to feel well and consequently I took the advice. But to-day Mr. A. Brisbane tell me that the more we lay down the better it is. So I do not know now what I have to do for my good health. Till now I used to read on my feet, more often leaning like an elephant against the wall; from now I will maibe sit down. Of course, the best way to prevent diseases and troubles to a man is kill him while he feel well. Accept, please, my regards and thanks.”

And always with his passionate love of the outdoors, and everything to be found there. In the summer-time Cornelia went to visit friends in the country, near the paper-box factory where Betty and Joe were working. Because the strain of her long labors was telling upon her, she took to outdoor work, and wrote much about her adventures. Bart replied:

“I am still smiling--to not say laughing. Yes, I would be very amused to see you work in your garden, for I alway laugh in observing the women at a manual work. When I wish to smile--I have only to think at a woman choping wood. I have take the ax out from the hands of some dozen of them, and cut the wood.

“But here we are! You know how to make an asparogus bed! I do not know to do it, and I have thought many time of it, for I like asparogus, and I intend if the possibility should come to cultivate them. Now I know by whom to be taught; and would it be possible, you would know what a worker I am, and what a garden I will plant and work out under your advice joined to some of my critersims. You would also know what a lighted heart the rough Bartolomeo has. In spite of all, I often feel yet as a child. I like to sing, to play and to foolish. But indeed, the water is rough now. Maibe, thanks to all the good ones among whom you are prominent, we will reach the shore someday.”

III

More discoveries of evidence, and more appeals to Judge Thayer. The defense got an expert on arms, and he studied the so-called “mortal bullet” under a high-powered microscope, and submitted a series of charts with very expensive photographs, proving that this bullet could not possibly have come through the Sacco pistol. To that the answer of the Commonwealth was easy; they too had money, and could employ experts. There were more long affidavits, full of technical terms and mathematical formulas. From first to last there were only two things a layman could be sure of; that every statement by every expert would be flatly contradicted by another statement of another expert; and that “Web” Thayer would believe the experts of his own side, and overlook those of the defense.

These charts and affidavits constituted what was known as the “Hamilton motion.” Then came the “Proctor motion”: an amazing story, exploding like a bombshell among the friends of the cause. A new lawyer had become active in the defense, William G. Thompson, and it happened that he had had some dealings with Captain Proctor of the state police. He went to Proctor and pleaded with him, and worked upon his conscience, with the result that the old man blurted out the whole story of his part in the “frame-up.” Thompson begged him to come and tell it to Judge Thayer, and Proctor said he would--provided the judge invited him. The lawyer went to Thayer in a fine fervor, thinking that the judge would be concerned about the truth, and be glad to see it prevail. But to his dismay he discovered that Thayer did not want to talk with Proctor. “We will try this proposition on affidavits,” he insisted.

So Proctor told his story, how the district attorney and his assistant had framed a question to Proctor in such a way that the jury would think he meant one thing, when in reality he meant another. And then came the answering affidavits of Katzmann and Williams, another illustration of the subtle art of betrayal--these answers were framed in such a way as to seem to deny the Proctor charge, but in reality to leave the central point untouched, and by implication to admit it!

The too-ardent young radicals imagined that this story would “blow things wide open.” But they found that what seemed a bombshell to them was a small firecracker to the rest of Massachusetts. This was the Harding-Coolidge era; “Nan Britton’s boy” was president of the United States, and the “Ohio gang” were the rulers of the nation. The oil men had finished looting the oil reserves of the navy, and the Veterans’ Bureau, supposed to take care of the victims of the great war, had stolen some hundreds of millions; all along the line, the password of government was “loot,” and the power of the secret service and the attorney-general’s office was used to threaten and intimidate those who disturbed the looters. In such a world it was hard indeed to get publicity for injustice done to a pair of wops; and after you had got it, the response of the public was that of the flag-saluting jury-foreman: “Damn them, they ought to hang anyhow!”

Boston was different. Boston had blue-bloods, Boston was pious, proper, and proud. But the payrolls for city work were padded with the names of many imaginary laborers; twenty policemen were accused of breaking into stores, holding wine parties in warehouses, and robbing prisoners. The state police were confiscating liquor, and selling it again, or giving it to their politician friends, who found it agreeable. The formula, “It just came off the boat,” was changed to read, “It just came from the State House.” By stages of graft you could mount, higher and higher, until you found yourself dealing in millions, and associating with the great bankers, who had loaned money to state legislators without security; these legislators had bought Elevated Railway stock, and had then voted a bill guaranteeing dividends, thus causing twenty-five million dollars worth of stock to jump from twenty-five to ninety. Rupert Alvin and his Pilgrim National crowd had not even had the inconvenience of being indicted for that crime; one rebel legislator, Thomas A. Niland, one opponent of graft among politicians, had hired a sandwich-man and set him to picket the Court House with a sign, reading: “Mr. District Attorney, indict the bribe givers and bribe takers of the Boston Elevated.”

The Jerry Walker case came to trial. More than five years after his properties had been taken from him, the manufacturer of felt got a chance to tell his troubles to a jury, and the public to see what happened to big bandits in the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The case was tried in Dedham Court House with the round white dome and portholes like an ocean liner; and it was destined to be appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, and finally decided within four weeks of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

The Jerry Walker trial lasted from the beginning of November, 1923, to the end of November, 1924; the longest law-battle ever known in the history of the Commonwealth. During that period of time Cornelia Thornwell heard about little else when she was in touch with her family. Two of her sons-in-law, two nephews-in-law, and two cousins-in-law were involved, and the families ate, slept, walked, rode and prayed with the case for the whole thirteen months. It was not merely that fifteen millions of dollars were at stake, but the family honor, and the safety of the country’s banking system; for if Jerry Walker won his case, all the business men who had lost their properties to bankers would set up similar claims. What would be the fun in banking, if you were confined to the interest on your funds, and could not use your control of credit to get possession of industry?

Cornelia was making it a rule to visit Sacco once or twice a month in Dedham jail, and she would stop at the court-house and watch the great duel of law. No guards with rifles on the steps, no gruff policemen to search your hand-bag, no steel cage for the defendants! No; for these were not the little bandits who break the law, these were the big bandits who make the law. Everything quiet and dignified, in the Harvard manner. With the exception of poor Jerry Walker himself, everybody was Harvard--the real reason poor Jerry had lost out.

Polished gentlemen, with soft voices and slow drawls, dressed with elegance, and always immaculate, regardless of weather and possible weaknesses of the flesh, arguing fine points of law, and presenting mountains of documents and miles of figures to a bewildered jury. You would not have guessed that there was anything very special or thrilling in process--unless you knew the sacred names, and realized that here were the bluest of blue-bloods, the center of the center and hub of the hub. These men who sat on hard benches listening, who took the witness-stand to testify for days and sometimes weeks, were the inner ring of those who held the financial and industrial power of New England for their own. There were times when, if you had sat with an adding machine, and tabulated the wealth owned by men in the court-room, it would have amounted to several hundred million dollars; if you had counted the wealth of other persons which they controlled, and used to sway markets and support credit for their own advantage, it would have totaled billions.

The trial would occupy a hundred and eighty-seven days of actual hearings; more than two thousand exceptions would be taken to the judge’s rulings, to be submitted to the higher court; the testimony would be close to six million words, and the cost of the procedure to the County of Norfolk would be more than two hundred thousand dollars. Out of its great generosity of heart, the legislature went so far as to pass a special measure, providing for the payment of nine dollars a day to the jurymen in this case--and the bill was made retroactive! It was in the public interest that these wholesale bandits should fight out their fights in a court-room, instead of hiring private armies and settling it on the streets. When the issue had been decided, these two facts would stand out: first, that Harvard blue-bloods had the money; and second, that their fellow-members of the Union Club had permitted them to keep it.

To Cornelia Thornwell the really significant thing was this: that so many concerned with the defense of the case were lying. The great bankers were hiding what they had done to Jerry Walker, and their great lawyers were sitting down with them, day after day and night after night, framing what they were going to say. For five years Cornelia had known that they would do this; it was so well understood in the family that nobody was equal to the task of attempting to fool her. There were fifteen millions of dollars at stake; and the driving power of this sum was so colossal that it swept every barrier before it, and truth, honor, dignity, justice, law, country, God and religion went out like the contents of a chicken-ranch when a dam bursts at the head of a valley.

Privately these bankers were quarreling bitterly among themselves as Cornelia knew; the wives were cutting one another at bridge-parties, and families were riven pro tem. But on the witness-stand every man stood by the ship, and obeyed the orders of the captain, Rupert Alvin. Cornelia got a new understanding of her oldest son-in-law. He had always seemed to her a semi-comic figure, with his face and neck of pink and purple bulges; humorless, naïve in spite of his heavy pomposity, and pathetic while being hen-pecked by a Thornwell lady whose family was older and greater than his. But now Cornelia observed him as a man among men, and realized what are the qualities of a successful bandit-leader.

They might be summed up in a single word, dependability; the gang must know that the leader will always be there, and will never change; that he will be the incarnation of solid, heavy, earnest greed, an irresistible and incessant push for large sums of other people’s money. Also, the gang must know that the leader will give them individually a greater share than any other leader of equal greed-power. A quality of Rupert’s that came out in the trial--he was a veritable mountain of righteous respectability. He had only wanted a small share of the loot for himself, and it had been necessary for his associates to insist that he should have a large share. Said Quincy Thornwell, gossiping with his Aunt Cornelia during the course of the revelations, “You always have to insist that Rupert take a large share. And you always do it. If you don’t, you are not in on the next big deal.”

Now here he was on the witness-stand, telling the story of his relationships with Jerry Walker; the president of the Pilgrim National Bank, who had promised poor Jerry a three-million-dollar loan at twenty-seven per cent interest, and had “strung him along” for months, having the plans all made, the syndicate of bankers formed, and Henry Cabot Winters supposed to be getting the agreements ready--when as a matter of fact Rupert had ordered that no agreements be got ready, having no purpose but to have poor Jerry in a “jam” when his “paper” came to maturity.

For more than a week Rupert was cross-questioned by Jerry’s little bull-dog of a lawyer, and he was most gentlemanly and aristocratic about his lying. He had reduced it to a formula, suitable to his simple mind; he could remember ten thousand details which were to his advantage, and he did remember them, promptly and exactly; but whenever there was any detail which would have been to his disadvantage, then he had forgotten about it. And that was all; it was charmingly easy--he had only to say, “I do not remember.” The cross-examiner might phrase the question in a score of different ways, he might make any number of approaches to it, but he could never get anything from the imperturbable Rupert except, “I do not remember.” It amused the lawyers of Jerry Walker to go over the record, and count up the number of matters about which Rupert’s memory had thus been adjusted to his interests; he had managed to forget one hundred and seventy-three different things.

Only once a bad slip! Early during the negotiations with Jerry Walker he had put the blame on Henry Cabot Winters, and had said to Jerry, “Henry has had his teeth in this thing once”--meaning in Jerry’s felt-business. That was a terrible admission, and Rupert made it elaborately, and in great detail, before his lawyers managed to interrupt, and convey to him that it wouldn’t do. The great banker then took the liberty of consulting his counsel; after the consultation, he retracted his admission, and denied that he had ever said any such thing to the plaintiff. A distressing moment; for there sat the reporters of half a dozen newspapers, their pencils plying busily, and the whole of State Street and the Union and Somerset Clubs waiting to read the story that afternoon.

Then, the ordeal being over for Rupert, he went back to Boston, and attended an assemblage of some men’s organization connected with his Episcopal Church. Some evil person proposed that the organization should take a stand upon the question of social justice, and Rupert got up and moved that the resolution be tabled, and made a powerful and impressive speech, in which he declared that the purpose of the Episcopal Church was “spirituality,” and that it should not be lured into controversies over mundane affairs. The Boston newspapers all reported the discourse, and were strong for “spirituality.”

Mr. Justice Thayer was rendering his decisions upon the various motions for a new trial. The “Ripley motion,” the “Daley motion,” the “Pelzer motion,” the “Andrews motion,” the “Goodridge motion”--he denied them all; and he was judge, and the sole judge. He decided that his own conduct had been proper, he decided that the new evidence was not such as to warrant a new trial.

The one thing his victims got out of these decisions was a holiday every time. The law required that the defendants should be present at all stages of the proceedings; and so a miniature army would be called out to move Nicola Sacco from Dedham Jail to Dedham Court-house, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti would leave his cell for a whole day, and become the delighted center of an automobile parade. He wrote Cornelia about it, beginning with his breakfast, “a cup of coffee, three slices of bread, two frankforts and mashed potatoes, all as cold as ice cream could be.” Later when it was proposed to publish this narrative, Bart was distressed, and insisted upon its being made plain that he had made this remark playfully, because of course the prison authorities could not prepare hot food out of hours.

“After such a breakfast, an official took me in the ‘Guard Room.’ The little chauffeur, an old officer, and the bravest one were waiting for me. I was chained with the last one, and all four left the room and went down to the street where the automobile was ready. Six or seven officers stood at the door, with their right hand near the back pocket, ready to protect me from any attack. One must be most ungrateful man of the world for not feeling quite reconoscent.”

And then his love of nature, the joy of escaping from darkness into sunshine and open air:

“So we enter now into a Park the name of which I already forget, but the beauty of it, I will never forget anymore. If I were poet and know the meter, I would write a song of it in third rhyme. (Italian, terza rima). I am not a poet, but neither so profane to disturbing such splendor with my poor ink. The concerned officer point to me a big brick building, saying ‘It is the Fine Arts Museum.’ He point many other buildings saying that they are almost all a private schools. I was, then regretting to have only a pair of eyes, able to look in one direction alone. I observe everything, the trees, the bushes, the grass, the rocks, and the brook along the way on which I was raptured. The drops of dew look like pearls; the sky reflects himself in the waters of the brook, and let one think that it is bottomless.”

VII

Nicola Sacco had been for more than three years a victim of the law’s delay. He had spent all but an hour or two each day in a cell with nothing to do, and the strain of it was affecting his mind. He could not understand why persons who espoused his cause should look for justice to one old man who hated him and was determined to have his life. He could not understand why this one old man should need years to decide matters about which his mind was made up in advance. He could not understand why the money of the anarchist movement should be wasted upon futilities. Brooding thus, he became morose, like a dog chained up; he suspected every one who came near him, he would not sign any more legal papers; presently he would not write letters, nor leave his cell, nor speak to any one.

Cornelia would travel to Dedham to test her social prestige upon the “chief officer,” as he was called, to obtain some amelioration of the harsh prison régime. The chief officer was large, stout, superannuated, and Cornelia, seeking to win his favor, had to listen to long discourses concerning his diet; he was centered upon “reducing,” and talked about it in more intimate detail than even Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge. He would keep an old lady standing while he enumerated the pounds he had managed to take off by this method and that; and the next time she came, he would forget what he had told her, and tell it again. “Would you believe that I used to weigh two hundred and sixty?”

This man who could not keep from eating too much would take a tin plate of cold food, with two slices of bread on top--a narrow plate, made especially to go between the bars of a cell--and if the prisoner in the cage complained of monotony and failed to eat the food, the chief officer would discourse for another hour to his visitors: these men were worth nothing, the more you did for them the less grateful they were. When Cornelia went away, he would grumble to the other officers about rich women who came “butting in on prisons,” spoiling the inmates, insisting on new things that nobody had ever heard of before. “Gosh, if that old hen would mind her own business!”

Some friends of this old gentleman insisted to Cornelia that he was well-meaning, and trying to do his duty as he saw it. But to her he seemed the embodiment of that mountainous, colossal, insensitive stupidity which was in authority throughout the world--which indeed seemed to be the very nature of authority. Several years ago there had been a legislative investigation of county institutions, and a severe arraignment of conditions; but the county graft-rings had been able to block every move, and nothing had been done.

Sacco was more of a problem than the average prisoner. He could not work in the plant which made shoes for the prisoners, because he was such a swift worker, he cleaned up everything in sight; moreover, another prisoner had attacked him, hating him as a “Red” and an atheist. He could not work in the carpenter shop, because he was a “murderer,” not to be trusted with tools. Kitchen work was barred for the same reason. In short, there was nothing for him but twenty-two hours a day in a cell; so he became frantic, and at half-past one o’clock in the morning leaped from his cot and began to pound his head against a chair, in an effort to dash out his brains. He succeeded in cutting four gashes in his scalp, which a surgeon had to sew up. Then Nick declared what he called a “hungry strike,” and for thirty-three days he did not touch food.

The chief officer was not allowed to do anything about it--so he understood the law; if a wop didn’t want to eat, nobody had a right to make him eat. It was good anarchist doctrine, and Cornelia discovered that many members of the defense committee agreed with it. The Italians were convinced that there was no hope of saving Nick from the chair, and according to their philosophy, a man had a right to end his life if he wanted to. If he did so, the agony would be over, and the cause would have a good martyr.

There was a hearing due on one of the motions for a new trial; one of those interminable farces that occurred every month or two, whenever a motion was made, a new affidavit submitted, an argument heard. Every such time the miniature army would go into action, and the two wops would be brought in and locked in the cage; Judge Thayer would enter with a rustle of black silk robes, and the bailiff would pound with his wand and repeat his formula, beginning, “Hear ye! Hear ye!” The judge would sit down, and have another chance to pour out his withering contempt upon the prisoners and their counsel.

But during the “hungry strike,” the sheriff refused to take the responsibility of moving Sacco from the jail to the court-house. What was to be done? Fred Moore had an office assigned to him, across the hall from the court-room; and there was a terrible scene--the lawyer maintaining his intention of going before the judge with a motion to determine Sacco’s sanity, and the anarchists arguing, denouncing, threatening, clamoring for the prisoner’s right to decide his own fate, without the intervention of aliens, enemies, traitors and spies. The uproar became so great that the judge sent the bailiff to command order. In the end Moore went ahead and made the motion, with Cornelia standing behind him. For this neither of them was ever forgiven.

VIII

Examinations were made, and the prisoner adjudged insane, and committed to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital--where they made short work of his anarchistic right to commit suicide. They strapped him into a chair and put a rubber tube up into his nose and down into his gullet, and poured in some milk. It is a hideously painful experience, and rather than undergo it again, Nick agreed to eat. After that he was committed to the Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminal Insane, where they were kind to him; the doctors would listen while he set forth his principles, and would agree that they were beautiful principles--as indeed they were. Very soon Nick was strong again, and a “good fellow,” eager and sociable. Outdoor work was given to him, and he did it gladly.

So now he was “cured,” and must go back to Dedham. But the physicians refused to certify him unless he was to have occupation; so the chief officer was induced to modify his time-honored régime. Nick was to do basket-weaving, and three times a week a volunteer teacher was to come and give him lessons. This was Mrs. Bang, a Danish lady, who taught manual training to blue-blood children in private schools; she must guard the dark secret, that she came three afternoons a week to visit an anarchist atheist draft-dodger convicted of banditry and murder.

Mrs. Bang was one more problem in Sacco’s life. Why should a person who was able to wear good clothes and drive about in an automobile, take six long journeys a week, through a New England winter, to teach anything to a prisoner without pay? It did not fit into the class-war theory. But Mrs. Bang won his confidence--it was easier, because she was a foreigner. Strange to say, she found that Nick loved America, and wanted to live here. His wife talked about going back to Italy, but he insisted that the children had a better chance in the new world. Page Mr. Katzmann!

Nick made bags from twine, decorated with beads; he made an elaborate tray of reeds, with flowers and butterflies. He developed a wish to learn English, the better to take his lessons. So came letters, to Mrs. Evans, to Mrs. Henderson, to Cornelia: letters in home-made spelling, but otherwise clear and direct. For example, when Cornelia made a present of clothing to his family:

“I remember a few years ago on our love day when I bought the first lovely blue suit for my dear Rosina and that dear remembrance still remains in my heart. That was the first day nineteen twelve in Milford, Mass., the celebration day of the five martyrs of Chicago, that in the mind of the humanity oppressed never will be forget. So in morning May first nineteen twelve I dress up with my new blue suit and I went over to see my dear Rosina and I asked her father if he won’t let Rosina come with me in the city town to buy something and he said yes. So in afternoon about one o’clock we both us went in city town, and we went in a big store and we bought a brown hat, a white underdress, a blue suit, one pair brown stock, one pair brown shoes, and after she was all dress up, I wish you could see Rosina, how nice she looked, while now the sufferings of to-day had make her look like an old woman. But I never was ambitious to buy her diamonds and so-so, but I always bought everything that could be natural and usefull.

“Just now I am sitting alone always, but with me, in my soul, in my heart, in my mind, are all immense legion of the noble and generous friends and comrades. Here I say I’m sitting writing to you these few lines; the sunlight it shines on my face and for a brief time it is a relief to my soul, and it brightens my mind by looking at the clear blue sky and the beautiful mother of nature.... I will live for humanity and for the solidarity and for the fraternity and for gratitude to all the friends and comrades who have worked for Sacco and Vanzetti; and I will live for freedom and for justice that is the justice of all of us.”

From scenes in Dedham jail Cornelia would walk a few blocks to Dedham court-house, and watch the male members of her family engaged in wholesale respectable perjury. She saw Henry Cabot Winters, who had spent his life harrowing other persons, and now for the first time was toad instead of harrow. Every trace of the familiar ease and charm was gone from Henry’s manner; he was exactly like any other witness telling lies and getting caught; the perspiration appeared upon his forehead, and had to be mopped away repeatedly. Under solemn oath he had declared that on a certain date he had had no interest whatever in the concerns of Jerry Walker; and then Jerry’s lawyer produced the charge-accounts of Henry’s office, in which the great man and his subordinates kept a record of the expenditure of their valuable time. On those pages Henry was set down as having given a thousand dollars’ worth to the Jerry Walker matter, and then five thousand more--it meant several days! He had even gone so far as to open a separate account for time given to the felt-business; he was starting to take it over, at a time when the owner was resting serene in the promises of Rupert and the other bankers, that he was to have three million dollars’ credit to handle his war-contracts!

Jerry Walker’s lawyers produced the accounts of all his concerns, and showed how prosperous they had been. They showed the complicated series of moves whereby Henry Cabot Winters had made it impossible for Jerry to get a dollar out of any of them. The lawyer had started fake bankruptcy proceedings against one enterprise; he had secretly purchased some of Jerry’s notes, and caused other persons to start lawsuits, to place attachments and obtain injunctions. And now here he was on the witness-stand, squirming and wincing, obliged either to admit that he had done these things, or else to be proved a perjurer.

On another day Cornelia heard the cross-examination of a great banker from New York, president of one of the dozen institutions which control the financial life of America. This gentleman had held several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Jerry’s notes, and had turned them over to Rupert and Henry, to be used in clubbing Jerry to his knees. He had sat down with the lawyers and learned an elaborate mass of perjury, and felt very uncomfortable while telling it to Jerry’s lawyer, because that lawyer happened to know him well. The lawyer asked a simple question, about which he knew the banker was going to lie; and he fixed his stern gaze upon his victim, a sort of hypnotic stare. Something happened to the witness, he “lost his head,” as the saying is; all that elaborate structure of falsehood which he had learned went suddenly out of his mind, he couldn’t remember the beginning or the end of it.

A dead silence in the court-room, a long, long silence, apparently endless. The witness sat with the lawyer staring into his eyes, like a rabbit fascinated by a snake. At last the judge had to intervene: “Are you conscious at all of any mental agitation just now, so that you would like to leave the stand for a time and compose your mind? I think we have been waiting nearly fifteen minutes for your answer to that question. Are you sensible of a desire to leave the stand for a while? If you are you may do so.”

But the great banker could not think what to say, even to that. The Court had to repeat and urge. “You might answer that question. I ask you if you desire to leave the stand for a time and collect your thoughts on this subject?”

Finally the witness found his voice: “I would like to, to be perfectly sure on this.”

Upon which the proceedings of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, now sitting within and for the County of Norfolk, came to a halt. The great Wall Street banker left the chair, and sat apart in the court-room, while everybody else, including the judge and the jury, did nothing but wait. An amazing, an incredible scene. Whispers of the spectators now and then, but mostly dead silence, so as not to interrupt the mental labors of the man of millions, supposed to be trying to recall whether he had had a certain conference with a certain man on a certain day--but in reality trying to bring back to mind the elaborate structure of falsehood which his lawyers had worked out for him.

For almost an hour that extraordinary pause continued; and all the while there were ghosts in the court-room, calling to Cornelia Thornwell. The ghosts of Nicola Sacco, being harrowed by District Attorney Katzmann! Nick being accused of the crime of having slandered Harvard College! Cornelia imagined him asking for an hour’s time to dig up from his subconscious mind the statistics, that Harvard educated free something over one hundred students every year, while the University of Wisconsin educated five thousand, eight hundred and ninety-five! She imagined Nick asking for an hour’s time to recollect whether he was “that man” who had dared to criticize America, after running away to Mexico! She imagined him sitting for an hour trying to recall what his lawyers had told him he had been doing on the night of his arrest! Picturing such things, Cornelia had an impulse to laugh out loud; which would have been a shocking breach of decorum--the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, now sitting within and for the County of Norfolk, would never have recovered from it. But no, Cornelia had been for forty years the mistress of a blue-blood household, and she sat, perfectly rigid, keeping her excitement inside.

Dark days for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, that year of 1924, with first Nick in the insane asylum, and then Bart. Funds had run out entirely; Fred Moore was a lawyer without an office; there was no committee, no program, no action--nothing but two wops in torment, and a promise of some legal decisions in an indefinite future. Judge Thayer was having an attack of pneumonia, and then of appendicitis; but refusing to die and let some other judge deal with the case. He would keep the half-crazed victims in their cells, until he could have the glory and the thrill of summoning them to court again, and with his cold metallic voice like a thin strip of steel cutting into their souls.

Betty and Joe had finished their year in the paper-box factory in a blaze of excitement. They had organized the workers, and been discharged for their activities; whereupon the workers had declared a strike, and stayed out nearly a month, and got soundly walloped by police and bosses. Betty had had her turn on the picket-line, and as a result had changed her philosophy; she was all for solidarity, and opposed to every label--socialist, communist, anarchist, or what not--which split the workers and wasted their energies. She would go to Charlestown to visit Bart, and they would get into an excited controversy, and Bart would write treatises to controvert her heresy. He would forget his own deadly peril, in his anxiety to save Betty from a false theory.

That was characteristic of all the Boston anarchists--they were strong on theory, and weak on actuality. It was that which made the defense so difficult; when a new move was to be made, they had to be persuaded, and it was a job that took until the small hours of the morning, and then had to be done all over again. No anarchist committee meeting ever ended, because somebody had a right to say something more; no decision could be taken, and if it was, it wasn’t binding. If you didn’t like it, you said nothing, but went off and worked against it. If anybody said that wasn’t fair, you shrugged your shoulders and said: “Shoo--er, why not? Ain’t I got right for say what I please? No, I no got to say it in committee, I say it when I want say it. If you not like it, you got right say so--any time, any place.”

In other words a committee of anarchists was a contradiction in terms; it was not a committee, but a number of impermeable and unassimilable units, and anybody who ever did anything was sure to be regarded as a dictator or meddler. Fred Moore was sleeping on a canvas cot in the committee-headquarters, and living on pancakes, because he had turned in his last salary-check to pay the printer; yet, if you brought up a new plan to raise funds, you would be sure to hear that it was contrary to “filosofia anarchica.” If, nevertheless, you insisted upon action, you would be told, “All right, do it, if you want, you got right.” But if you insisted that the sanction of the committee was necessary before the action could be effective, you would hear, “No, we don’t give no sanction, if you want do it, you do it for self.”

Even at times when money was on hand, it was almost impossible to get them to pay it out. Money was contrary to “filosofia anarchica,” it was an instrument and a symbol of graft. What did people need so much for? What right did they have to it? In one desperate pinch, Cornelia sent an organizer to New York, to address meetings and appeal to the radical labor unions, especially the Jewish clothing-workers. This man sent back a couple of thousand dollars; but he had to come back to Boston in order to get his weekly pay-check to keep him going.

Fred Moore’s idea was to spend money to get more; it was the American way. When he learned that there was a convict in Atlanta penitentiary who might tell something about the real bandits, he wanted to get on the train and rush down there; he did not want to spend a night arguing with the committee, and miss his train as a result. When he wanted to send a man to Italy to hunt for Coacci or Boda, or to trail a suspected bandit to Texas or the Argentine, Moore would have to threaten to drop the case; it would be the only way to get a check signed.

Such were the sufferings of lawyers in contact with anarchists: and equally real and anguished were the sufferings of anarchists in contact with lawyers! To rebels and “libertarians” the lawyer was the incarnation of repression and enslavement; he was a spider who spun webs of tradition about the limbs of humanity. Everything he did was waste, his very language was an insult, and the expense he incurred meant a bleeding to death of the radical movement. Let the martyrs die, and spend the money upon “literature,” said the fanatics. But the lawyer would point out that the money would not come for “literature,” it came to keep the martyrs alive, and he was the sole possessor of the secret lore whereby that might be accomplished.

As individuals, you would find many of these Italian anarchists simple and lovable, sometimes charming; in their naïveté a relief from New England stiffness and solemnity. You must be patient with their fanaticism, realizing that it was the excess of a virtue; they represented the principle of variation, without which human life would be that of the ants and bees. When you found them most exasperating--when you felt like taking the whole of “filosofia anarchica” and dumping it into the Back Bay--then you must remind yourself that great scientists had held and taught this creed, Kropotkin and the Reclus brothers; great poets, such as Shelley and Emerson; moral teachers, such as Tolstoi and Thoreau, George Fox and William Penn, Jesus and Buddha. Not all these had called themselves by the name anarchist, but all had stood for the principle, the supremacy of the individual conscience over social compulsion. If the movement produced more dangerous lunatics than it did prophets and saints, that was the price which humanity had to pay in the search for higher types of being.

Dark days for idealists and dreamers of “joostice”! Fascist reaction enthroned in Italy, and reaching out to control America; organizing the Italians into murder-bands, to break up Socialist meetings in American cities, and obtain the deportation of Italian radicals, to be shot at home. In such activities they would have the coöperation of American police, and of Federal secret service; Mussolini was the new hero of our bankers and college-students, generally voted the greatest man in the world.

It was a presidential election year, and Senator LaFollette, who had exposed the oil-thieves, was a Bolshevik and betrayer of his country, while “Cautious Cal” was the strong silent statesman, who had made more speeches than any other man ever in the White House. In their frenzy of reaction the big business men even set out to smash the proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting child-labor, and keep several millions of little ones in mills and mines, instead of going to school. There was a ferocious campaign in Massachusetts, an explosion of all the forces of bigotry and avarice. The little group of workers for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense lived in the midst of that uproar, like travelers in an African jungle who hear the beating of tom-toms and see the glare of fires upon which human flesh is being roasted.

Cal Coolidge’s political and financial boss was a great lord of cotton-mills in New England, soon to be made a United States senator. He it was who led this campaign, and rallied the business men and bankers, the newspaper editors and college professors, the bootleggers, the criminals, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This latter organization, kept generously by the business interests, had invested its funds in choice real estate, and become one of the wealthiest corporations in the Commonwealth. Now was the time for it to pay its debt, and suffer the little children to come unto the mill-masters.

The head of this religious machine was Cardinal O’Connell, jovially referred to by the newspaper men as “Big Bill,” and by his enemies as “the papal bull”; a huge hippopotamus of a man, weighing over three hundred pounds, and like Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge and the chief officer of Dedham Jail, devoting his attention to the problem of “reducing.” It happened that Cornelia had spent her summers near the prelate’s summer residence, and seen him daily, taking his constitutional, a picturesque figure in a scarlet cloak, against a background of azure river. To his intimates he was a genial and convivial soul--not troubled by the eighteenth amendment, but having access to the best stores of conviviality. He was an organist and a judge of pictures, a generous buyer of old masters and rare books; a Renaissance prince of the church, building a white stone palace out on Commonwealth Avenue. The Jews had built themselves a Temple Israel nearby, a plain concrete structure, and the Irish-Catholic conductors of street-cars, answering the questions of tourists, would point their thumb contemptuously and say, “That? Sure, that’s Cardinal O’Connell’s garage.”

Cornelia went to see him, a little later on, escorted by her nephew Quincy. She pleaded with the great man to say a word for mercy to Sacco and Vanzetti; but he was cautious and preferred to talk about Japanese art and Buddhist philosophy. Quincy sat, a much-amused spectator; being a wit and diner-out, he knew the great man, and had brought his Bolshevik aunt to tea by way of a prank. Going and coming, Quincy told stories about the Cardinal, who had begun life as an Irish “mick” in “the Patch,” as the slums of Lowell were known. He was much too intelligent a man to believe the mythology he taught; but he held that it was what the masses needed to keep them obedient. He owned many blocks of stock in cotton-mills, and was a reactionist now, but in his young days had been a modernist, and highly indignant because some of his writings had been put on the Index.

There were many Catholics among the millionaire industrialists and bankers of Massachusetts, and the Cardinal would invite them to dinner; they would come with stars on their bosoms and garters on their legs, and would be in heaven. The great prelate could ask them for a million or two any day, and buy the best sites for orphan asylums and seminaries and church colleges and what not. In this way he had spent fifty million dollars in ten years. So now when these mill-owners and bankers wanted the people of Massachusetts to vote their children into wage-slavery, “Big Bill” was the boy to do their job.

Four Sundays during the month of October, 1924, he made every priest in the diocese stand before the high altar at high mass, and read aloud a diatribe, based upon the lies circulated by the manufacturers’ agents, representing the Children’s Bureau at Washington as a device of Moscow for the undermining of the American home. Mrs. Florence Kelley, leading social worker, and champion of the child-labor amendment, had once been the wife of a Russian. Thirty-two years previously, she had divorced this man, and had received from the courts the right to resume her father’s name of Kelley; she had been a “Kelley” for sixty out of her sixty-eight years of life. But now the opponents of the child-labor amendment placarded her from Maine to California as Mrs. Wischnewetzky, Bolshevik agent! By methods such as this, they induced the people of Massachusetts to vote down the amendment by two to one, and the little children of the Commonwealth were saved for God and Senator Butler.

XII

In November, 1924, after a year, Judge Thayer handed down his decision on the Proctor motion for a new trial. This motion was the main reliance of the defense lawyers; they could not imagine how the confession of one of the state’s leading witnesses that he had “framed” his evidence in collusion with the prosecutors, could fail to be ground for a new trial. But “Web” would show them! He would crowd all his arts into one document--twisting and wriggling, evading issues; misrepresenting everything the defense lawyers had claimed about the Proctor confession.

The issue was very simple, but “Web” wound it up in thousands of words, and to make plain all his tricks would require thousands more. He said that the questions asked of Captain Proctor were clear, and must have been perfectly understood by him; which would have been a good joke, if it had been meant as such. Of course they were understood by Proctor, and no one had ever suggested that they were not. What Proctor had confessed was that the questions had been contrived for the purpose of being obscure to the jury: which was certainly an entirely different matter.

Next “Web” asked whether the questions were “unfair or improper.” Of course they were not. What had been “unfair and improper” was that the witness and the district attorney had framed the questions in such a way that the jury would think they meant what they didn’t mean; also that the judge had represented to the jury that they meant what they didn’t mean.

The question which had been “framed” had to do with whether Proctor, as an expert on fire-arms, believed that the “mortal bullet” had come through Sacco’s pistol and none other. And it really made you wonder if you were dealing with an insane man when the judge went on from point to point, asking over and over again why Proctor hadn’t said plainly what he meant; as if Proctor had tried to make matters plain, and failed--when the whole point of the confession was that he had deliberately made matters obscure!

But “cunning old Fury” was not insane; he knew what he was doing, and went ahead, twisting every contention out of shape, misrepresenting the plain meaning of the plainest English words. He charged the defense lawyers with having claimed that Proctor “honestly believed that the mortal bullet was not fired through the Sacco pistol.” But Proctor had not said that, and the defense had not said that he had said it.

Funniest joke of all--“Web” said that the answers of the district attorney and his assistant to the Proctor confession were “clear and convincing.” To employ the slang of Pierre Leon, you could “bet your shoes” they were! They were clear and convincing of the fact that Katzmann and Williams knew that Proctor’s confession was true, and had not dared to deny it while Proctor was alive. They had carefully evaded the main point; and the judge now carefully followed suit; relying, of course, upon the fact that nobody would have the text of the answers, nor the patience to disentangle the sophistry in them.

Having performed this intellectual feat, “Web” was proud of it, and went out, as usual, to boast. He thought he had earned a holiday, so he went to Dartmouth, his college, to attend one of the football games. On the field he saw Professor James P. Richardson, and came up to him, demanding in a loud voice: “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for a while. Let them go to the supreme court now and see what they can get out of them!” There was more to the discourse, and the professor stood, upon pins and needles, as the saying is, because it seemed to him an unimaginable impropriety, and he knew that others were listening. He got away as quickly as he could.

It was “Web’s” way. He was engaged upon a crusade, to destroy the Reds in Massachusetts; and he did not understand how others could fail to be interested in his exploits. He would punish his friends, his club-mates and associates with long tirades, until they would be bored and ask him to quit. A group of lawyers who lunched in the club at Worcester, would turn their shoulders to him and talk about other matters. The old man would sit mumbling to himself: “They don’t understand! They don’t realize! The Vandals are at our gates, and are going to destroy us!”

XIII

This failure of the “Proctor motion” was the finishing blow for Vanzetti. Impossible to hope after that! Impossible to go on enduring the indignities of prison. Bart decided that his friends and the whole movement were being betrayed. Also he took up the notion that his ill health was due to slow poisons given to him in his food. He too declared a “hungry-strike,” and about Christmas-time of the year 1924 was certified to the Bridgewater asylum. The Sunday after he was taken away, the prison chaplain preached a sermon to his flock, pointing out the danger of departing from the holy faith. Look at poor Vanzetti, who had lost his mind, a hopeless wreck! It was the same Father Murphy who had said, “Tell me, Vanzetti, who drove the car at South Braintree?”

To the psychiatrists at Bridgewater this prisoner represented a well-known type; a victim of what they called “delusions of grandeur,” or the “messianic complex.” He had the notion that the future would be interested in him and his sayings and doings; that books would be written about his case, and translated into many languages, and read by millions of people. He lived his life and endured his sufferings in the presence of future generations, who would reverse Judge Thayer’s verdict upon him, as they had reversed other verdicts upon agitators and rebels--John Brown and Giordano Bruno and John Huss, Galileo and Socrates and Jesus. Furthermore, he had the fixed idea that he could learn to write English, and accumulated quantities of manuscript, which he thought would convert others to his cause.

In order to pacify him, it was necessary to pretend to agree with him, and then one could have quite interesting talks. He was a man of surprising culture, considering that he had been a laborer all his life; he was reflective, shrewd, even humorous at times. He did not make friends easily, preferring to sit aloof; but when a physician said that he believed in “joostice,” the prisoner would be eager to explain his brand of it, and would sit for hours, telling Dr. Stearns with the utmost seriousness how a society might be run without government or forcible repression.

These specialists in human mentality were not asked their opinion as to the probable guilt of this convicted bandit, but they could not help having ideas on the subject. They reported Vanzetti as of the intellectual, not the motor type; awkward, not active. They said that if he committed an assault, it would be, not with intent to kill, but to show feeling. They pictured a man with his excess of emotion and imagination, attempting to commit a hold-up; it was their judgment that his heart would beat violently, his knees would shake, he would hear a noise behind him, and whirl about and shoot blindly, or throw away the gun in a panic--a “brainstorm,” as it was known to the writers and readers of crime-news. The psychiatrists furthermore reported that the professional bandits and hold-up men in the prisons jeered at the idea that Sacco and Vanzetti could have done that South Braintree job; they were offended in their dignity by the suggestion that a couple of bunglers and novices could have got away with anything so competent and swift.

XIV

The jury brought in its verdict in the Jerry Walker case; a terrible blow to the Thornwell men--saying, in effect, that they had perjured themselves upon the witness-stand. The jury found that Jerry Walker was entitled to damages equal to the market value of his properties at the time they were taken from him, plus the interest; a trifle over ten and one-half millions of dollars. It was the biggest verdict ever brought in the Commonwealth, and men talked about it in the clubs for weeks.

The decision was announced a week before Christmas, and completely spoiled that gracious season in the Thornwell, Winters, Alvin, and Scatterbridge homes. Rupert took to his bed with a severe “coryza”--since it would not do for a great banker to have a common cold. He entertained his wife and visiting ladies of the family with terrible pictures of the collapse of Boston banking, consequent upon the custom of allowing decisions concerning millions of dollars to rest in the hands of men who could not have financed a peanut-stand. According to Rupert, all the bankers in Boston would immediately be sued for all the money they had made in the last ten years--which was a commentary on the city’s banking-system from a leading authority.

Rupert’s expensive lawyers would be put to work at once to appeal the case; and even while he was scolding and pessimizing, and snuffling and sneezing and snorting and blowing with the coryza, Rupert’s mental dynamo was driving away at new plans. The details of the appeal would be left to the lawyers, while Rupert would concentrate on the judges. He had suggested the appointment of two or three members of the Supreme Judicial Court, and hoped he could count upon them. He began figuring over the others: their families and connections, social and financial. Whose men were they, and what obligations were they under?

Presently Rupert would be sending for good gossips, such as Quincy Thornwell, who could help him pick up information. If any of these judges had close relatives who were lawyers, it might be a good idea to retain these. If they had intimate friends who could talk to them, methods must be worked out to approach these friends--in a strictly high-minded and proper way, of course--pointing out to them the dreadful state of uncertainty in which the financial affairs of Massachusetts were left by this unprecedented jury decision. How could big bandits stay in business, if, after they had held a pistol to the victim’s head and got him to sign a document excusing them for the robbery, the police should be allowed to step in and say that the document didn’t count?

It would take more than two years for the Full Court of the Supreme Judicial Court to weigh and decide this mighty issue; so Rupert had plenty of time to continue his intrigue. He would not have to buy any members of the higher court; he trusted that nobody had been appointed who was not the sort of person to respect great bankers and appreciate their difficulties as the invisible rulers of America. It was an unwritten custom that as soon as a man was appointed to this court he was also made a member of the very old and exclusive Union Club; so Rupert and his associates would meet the justices at luncheon every day when the court was in session; and while they would not be so crude as to refer to the case, they could talk about business stability and the sanctity of contracts; they could arrange for others to do the same, the big and weighty men to whom the justices had had to come, to beg for the favor of appointment. At the time when Rupert knew the Full Court was giving its time to the case, he would bring it about that great bankers from New York would happen to ride up in the elevator with the justices and happen to remark in clear tones that all business in New England was held up, waiting to find out if the courts were going to permit credit to be undermined and contracts repudiated.

Yet, with all this power in his hands, Rupert was nervous; he could not help worrying, to the great damage of the calcified veins in his ankles and legs. His brother-in-law tried in vain to keep him cheerful: Henry Cabot Winters, who had worked out for himself a wonderful scheme, whereby he was going to snap his fingers at all courts and their decisions. Henry was going to make over his property to his sister, and then go into bankruptcy!

Ordinarily this service is performed for business men by their wives; but Henry was afraid of Alice. Not that she would keep his money--no Thornwell would ever be a thief; but she might have a brainstorm, and decide that it was for the good of his soul for the money to be turned over to an occultist society. Just now the mad streak in the Thornwells was manifesting itself in Alice’s determination to be a lady “chela.” She was bringing bowls of rice and fresh straw for bedding to a real “shri,” who was at one with Brahma, and must not be spoken to. Every day Alice put on a snow-white robe and stood in front of a black screen in a pitch-dark room, in order that her aura might be studied, and her soul-troubles diagnosed thereby.

But Henry had a sister, Agatha Winters, who was pure “New England,” unmarried and unchanging. He went to see her in the village where she lived in the family homestead, devoting herself to church work. He explained his troubles; wicked men had conspired to ruin him, and if they succeeded, obviously he would no longer be able to contribute to his sister’s support, and she would no longer be able to give her time to the Lord. So Agatha knew that it was the Lord’s purpose for her to aid Henry against his enemies. She had learned from the Old Testament that the Lord aided His own against others, and that He was not too scrupulous as to the means.

So Henry put five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of liberty bonds into Agatha’s name, and had them sold and converted into a bank-draft payable to her. She endorsed it, and Henry sold her some of his property for it. He then bought more liberty bonds, and had them sold in Agatha’s name, and put the money into another bank-draft, for which Agatha bought another half-million dollars’ worth of his property. This procedure was continued until Agatha was the registered legal owner of every bond and share of stock and piece of real estate which Henry owned, including everything which he had got from Jerry Walker; including even the automobile he drove, the yacht on which he spent his week-ends, the five-gaited snow-white Arabian stallion which he rode, and the apartment-house in which he kept his mistress, a charming and popular concert-singer.

So the great lawyer could go into court and swear that he did not own a dollar in the world; and Agatha would be able to produce canceled vouchers, showing the actual payment of cash to the full market value of every piece of property she had acquired. Hidden away in a safe-deposit box to which Henry alone had the key there was a will, executed by Agatha in Henry’s favor; and a deed, selling back to Henry for the sum of one dollar and other good and valuable considerations, all the property which Henry had sold to Agatha. This latter document was blank as to date; thus Henry had everything fixed so that, the day the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the Jerry Walker verdict, he could file a petition in bankruptcy, and wipe out his share of the claims forever. After which, he would take back his property again, and laugh in the face of his enemies!

XVI

The Thornwell generations came and went. Great-uncle Abner had a paralytic stroke, which intercepted the nerves in his legs. No longer did he ride about “Hillview” on a pony, but sat in a wheel-chair and stormed and fussed when his attendants delayed to bring his meals. He still had his deaf man’s voice, but could not hear a sound; you wrote your ideas on a pad for him to read. You did not have to write very much, because he was interested in his own ideas, and content if you would sit and nod and smile. Every time he found anything in his Evening Transcript damaging to the reputation of a “Red,” he would cut it out and mark it, and mail it to Cornelia with injurious comments.

To make up for the loss of Abner’s legs, Betty’s older sister, Priscilla, brought four of them, eagerly kicking, into the world. The first time it was a boy, and his name at once became Alvin Thornwell Shaw, quite a load for two tiny red legs to kick under. Since his father was a mighty mountain of copper, it pleased his Aunt Betty to refer to him as the young copper hill; and when the second heir arrived and proved to be a niece, Betty took to calling her the little branch bank. Betty herself was not going to provide her mother and father with any grandchildren--at least not for a while. Betty talked defiantly about the wicked practice known as “birth control,” and said that this was not a fit world into which to bring babies. What was the use of raising boys for the military men to take away from you and kill? What was the use of raising either boys or girls when their grandparents would insist upon leaving them millions of dollars, thereby turning them into parasites and deadheads?

Family propriety compelled the inviting of Cornelia to act as godparent to both the copper hill and the branch bank; but each time she modestly declined, not feeling equal to the responsibility of training either Thornwells or Shaws. But she attended the baptisms, which were in Trinity Church on a weekday afternoon, with many relatives and some invited friends. The font had been made beautiful with flowers, and there was a hymn sung by those present, and the precious infant slept soundly, wearing the embroidered christening robe, two yards long, which had been made for Great-great-great-grandfather Thornwell, the sea-captain, and used at the baptisms of his infant descendants ever since. When the splashing of cold water woke the victim up, it let out a yell of indignation, which was a good sign, the old ladies said, because it let the devil out; the old men chuckled, and commented--a powerful voice, like Abner Thornwell’s and Josiah’s--it was the old stock!

There were two godfathers and one godmother for the boy, and the second time one godfather and two godmothers for the girl. Each time these sponsors in baptism did promise and vow three things in the infant’s name; of which the first was that it would “renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all the covetous desires of the same.” Cornelia Thornwell looked about her: here was the elder Shaw, grandfather of this infant, who sat tight upon a huge store of treasure, and some twelve years ago, when his wage-slaves in the Mesaba Range had dared to revolt, had sent in thugs and gunmen to slug and murder them, exactly as if it had been at home in Massachusetts. And here was Rupert Alvin, who had taken away ten million dollars from Jerry Walker, and now was trying to undermine the highest court of his Commonwealth in order to keep it. The covetous desires of the world!

And then the “vain pomp and glory.” Here were stately male personages in striped trousers and cutaway coats, or braided black broadcloth, the very stick-pins in their ties having ritual significance; here were ladies, who had made a life-study of the art of demonstrating their millions and tens of millions without appearing to do so. Here was a temple built with hands, having single windows which had cost thousands of dollars, and nothing within sight of it that was not luxurious. Outside were shining limousines, and liveried chauffeurs waiting. At the Alvin mansion there was a collation, and heads of finance and fashion would eat cake and drink punch, and gossip about everything that was expensive and therefore important. At the Shaw mansion they were preparing a dinner-dance for next week, that would be the most costly affair of the season; they would furnish the newspapers with every detail of a great family advertisement, and eagerly read every word next morning. The vain pomp and glory of the world!

And all this in the name of Comrade Jesus! A strange, strange prank of time! Cornelia came out from the famous brownstone temple, erected to the glory of the proletarian martyr, and walked past the statue of Phillips Brooks, which graced one side of it. A figure of the Son of Man, stepping out of the side of the building and laying his hand upon the shoulder of the great Bishop of the Blue-bloods. Bishop Brooks had been quite a radical in his day, and the wits of the city were wont to say that the hand of Jesus was an admonitory hand, and that Jesus was saying, “Be careful, old man, remember what they did to me, and I didn’t say half what you are saying!”

From this ceremony Cornelia went to visit Vanzetti, who had been certified back to Charlestown, and was shoveling coal again. She was moved to tell him where she had been, and what she had seen, and her thoughts on the subject. “I have been wondering, Bart, if they should make a martyr out of you, will people be committing crimes and hypocrisies in your name a couple of thousand years from now?”

It was an idea the prisoner took seriously; the thought of martyrdom having become the mainspring of his lonely life. “Nonna,” said he “if they make me martyr, I fix it, I write message it cannot be mistake. If anybody say Vanzett’, it mean joostice, it mean freedom--it cannot mean nothing but!”

XVII

It was Boston, pious, proper, and proud. The Telegram was publishing onslaughts upon Sacco and Vanzetti, calling for their blood because they were “atheists.” One day the staid bankers and brokers of State Street, proceeding about their business in front of the Old State House, scene of the Boston Massacre, were astonished by the spectacle of the publisher of the Telegram rolling in the gutter, pummeling and being pummeled by the Honorable James Michael Curley, until recently mayor of the city. Next day the two champions were issuing statements in the newspapers, each claiming to have done the more successful pummeling. The day after that the publisher was publishing a cartoon of the ex-mayor, showing him in prison stripes--he having “done” a few months many years back. And then the ex-mayor was sending the publisher to jail for criminal libel: all this in Boston, pious, proper, and proud, thirsting for the blood of “atheists”!

XVII. THE MILLS OF THE LAW

Betty Alvin was now twenty-six years of age; old enough to know better, as her family and friends insisted, but she continued to give her time to the stirring up of social discontent. She and Joe had taken up the task of founding a labor college in Boston, to teach the workers to think for themselves, instead of for the stockholders and the bankers. Joe was teaching a class, two evenings a week, the history of European labor movements, and writing a book on the subject. Betty, learned young lady, was expounding “labor theory”; trying to adhere to a policy of working-class solidarity, and being perpetually pulled and hauled between socialists and communists. However, they would all excuse her, on the basis of her “bourgeois upbringing.” In the daytime she inspected accounts and paid bills; or, when this was not possible, sallied forth to raise money. She would visit the offices of Irish-Catholic labor leaders, and do her best to persuade them that it was really in the interest of unions for idle-rich girls to meddle in their affairs, and teach them complicated theories with long foreign names.

Hard-fisted individuals these, having fought their way in a world of realities--which included Democratic and Republican politicians seeking votes and promising favors; also agents of employers making presents of boxes of cigars, and willing to lose unlimited sums at poker. “Parlor pinks,” who mixed in the affairs of such gentry would learn a lot of things not in the Radcliffe curriculum; they would have a hard time deciding which leaders to educate and which to kill off. For the sake of Sacco and Vanzetti in the shadow of the electric chair it was necessary to be patient and tactful; to appeal to class solidarity, and to human feelings not entirely atrophied. Thus you might get a chance to present your case before some labor body, and have anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred dollars voted to the defense.

Betty had now been for more than three years the lawful and duly certified wife of Joseph Jefferson Randall--even though she insisted upon belonging to the “Lucy Stoners,” and remaining “Betty Alvin,” not even “Mrs.” Was it a part of the same eccentricity, that she refused to do her duty by her family, and pass on to the ages those excellences of which the family was so conscious? Did these modern young wives repudiate babies altogether, and, if so, what substitute had they to propose? Deborah never failed to make such inquiries when she met her daughter.

Now Betty came to Cornelia: “Grannie, I guess it’s my turn.”

“How do you mean, dear?”

“Well, there’s a saying that accidents will happen in the best regulated families, and it seems that the Lord is on the side of the Thornwell clan.” Such was the fashion of speech of these modern, hard-boiled young women; they would not permit themselves any of the traditional thrills of their sex, which they called being “soppy.” When they referred to matters ordinarily considered “delicate,” they seemingly went out of their way to find the most offensive language, with which the ears of their chaste grandmothers had never in a whole lifetime been assailed. In Betty this reaction was especially violent, as a result of having been brought up in Boston, and hearing somebody say “Hush!” several times every day. She persisted in going about telling all her friends, both men and women, the medical facts about herself; refusing to put on garments ingeniously contrived for the hiding of her shameful condition, going to her labor college and teaching classes at a time when she was a scandal on the street.

She even told two “wops” about it, when she went to see them in jail. They, being peasants, took it as a matter of course; they were used to babies, as to all other kinds of young animals. Betty would even permit Vanzetti to be “soppy”--he being in jail, and having a hard time to keep his sanity. Poor devil, he needed something young and new and sweet and healthy and happy to occupy his thoughts, so when Betty went to see him, she told him how it felt when the unborn baby kicked. It might have been one old “nonna” gossiping with another old “nonna,” scrubbing clothes on the banks of the River Magra.

In due course the infant phenomenon arrived. It was a boy, and his name had been determined several months before he was born--Rupert Alvin Thornwell Randall; it would be worth millions to him some day, in spite of his mother’s protests. The war that was to last all his lifetime began in the first weeks; for of course his name wouldn’t be his name, until it had been conferred upon him in Trinity Church; and here were his mother and father declaring that he wasn’t going to be baptized! The family brought Betty to admit that it wouldn’t do any harm; if they chose to dress him up in an old linen robe two yards long and sprinkle cold water on his head, she would not interfere, but certainly they must not expect her or Joe to waste time on such foolishness. Neither must they get the idea that this particular grandchild was going to be permitted to visit them, and be waited upon by servants and demoralized by the uses of luxury. Rupert Alvin Thornwell Randall was going to live among working people, and grow up to be of some use in the world. The grandparents did not argue that; they would have the baptism first, and save the little one’s soul. The other issues could be fought out later!

Cornelia was continuing to devote her life to the Sacco-Vanzetti case. She would get herself invited to gatherings of ladies, and tell them the cruel story, and when they said they were “so sorry,” she would ask just how sorry, and explain that sorrow was measured in figures on a bank-check. She would help the defense committee to organize entertainments and benefit performances--which, alas, sometimes cost more than they brought in. She would visit headquarters, and try to keep things moving, to reconcile the endless clashings of personalities. Always there was something needing to be done, and one could not do it, or even urge it, without antagonizing somebody. What Vanzetti called “umane beings” had not yet evolved to a stage where they could merge their personalities and coöperate; they had to waste the greater part of their energies in friction. Cornelia would be so discouraged that she would give up, and tell them to do what they pleased; but then they would do nothing--and meantime there were Bart and Nick on the way to execution!

The antagonism between Fred Moore and some members of the committee had waxed with the years. It was impossible for anarchists to get along with any lawyer; it was especially hard with this one, who was hell-bent upon discovering the real criminals, and insisted upon spending defense funds in tracing clews, chasing off to Atlanta penitentiary or to Texas, sending some one to Italy or to South America to run down a story. Moore would either have his way or quit; and in the end his enemies made his position impossible, by undermining the faith of his clients in him. He received a letter from Sacco, signed, “Your implacable enemy, now and forever”; so the lawyer realized that the days of his usefulness were over. “I have failed,” he said to Cornelia; “and it’s a game where nothing succeeds but success.”

There was an interregnum, with no lawyer, no anything else--except two prisoners on the way to the electric chair. Finally the committee was reorganized; some Italians withdrew, some Americans were taken on, and overtures were made to William G. Thompson to take charge of the new motions and appeals. He knew how much trouble it would mean, and set his fee at a figure which he meant to be prohibitive, twenty-five thousand dollars. There was a problem for Cornelia and Betty and Joe!

It was solved by a curious turn of events, hardly possible in any part of the world except Boston. A young man by the name of Charles Garland, while a student at Harvard, had known Jack Reed, and become troubled in his conscience. Now Reed had given his life to the Russian revolution, and was buried under the Kremlin walls; while his friend Garland fell heir to a million dollars. His conscience not permitting him to accept it, he turned it over to a committee, to be expended for the benefit of labor. So there was the “Garland fund”; and in this emergency it was persuaded to lend twenty thousand dollars to the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and William G. Thompson was put in charge of the case.

A man in his early sixties, with iron-gray hair and ruddy skin, six feet tall and broad shouldered, dry and humorous, smoking a pipe and looking like a Yankee farmer, Thompson proved to be the boss of which the case had been in need. He became convinced that the machinery of justice was being used for persecution, and turned into a crusader in defense of his clients. Before he got through, the fee he had charged did not cover his office overhead; yet his enemies accused him of having profited unduly, and tried to have the Bar Association proceed against him for the offense of defending anarchists.

He had his strict ideas of propriety. This was a law-case, and was to be tried in the courts, and everything which savored of “propaganda” must be rigidly avoided. Which brought him, of course, into conflict with active friends of the cause. To Joe and Betty, propaganda was the essence of the defense; it was propaganda which had made possible the appeals and kept the two men alive; it was propaganda which brought in money to pay lawyers. Vanzetti’s opinion was summed up in his formula, “Unless a million men can be mobilized in our defense, we are lost.” He wanted the money spent, not for legal proceedings, but for speakers among the labor unions. But Thompson forced the canceling of a mass-meeting in Boston, by threatening to withdraw from the case if it was held.

Mary Donovan was now recording secretary of the committee without pay: an Irish-Catholic girl who had gone to college and joined the Socialist party, and been formally excommunicated by her bishop. She had a position as state factory inspector--but did not retain it very long after she took up the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. It was supposed to be a civil service position, but the politicians did not let that trouble them. They brought charges against her and proved that she had worked for the defense during several hours when she was supposed to be working for the Commonwealth. She offered to show that others in her department had done private work on public pay for weeks at a time; but that kind of evidence was not wanted.

Another recruit, Gardner Jackson, Amherst man, a newspaper reporter, very conscientious--the “Y.M.C.A. type,” as an enemy described him; passionately convinced of the innocence of the prisoners, and being drawn in more and more deeply, until finally he was giving all his time without pay. But he was not a “radical,” and did not want any movement to use the case for its own ends; therefore socialists, and more especially communists, quarreled with him. These disputes went on until the very end--and afterwards, when the different groups fought over the corpses of the victims. Said Mary Donovan, white-faced with anguish, “These bodies belong to us! Can’t they even go to their graves in peace?” But the communists thought that the bodies belonged to the international revolutionary movement, and should be used to waken the masses to class-consciousness.

III

But those horrors lay in the future, and the Master of Events led men to them blindfolded. Neither radicals nor conservatives might lift a corner of the veil, to see what lay beyond it. They could imagine, and fear--and shrink back, unable to face what they feared. They would clench their hands and set their teeth and redouble their efforts to stave off the inevitable.

The mills of the law were grinding. One by one they ground up the motions for a new trial: the Ripley motion, the Daley, the Pelzer, the Andrews, the Gould, the Goodridge, the Hamilton, the Proctor motions. Judge Webster Thayer denied them one by one, and they became the basis of appeals to the Supreme Judicial Court, and to the public for funds to defray the bills of official printers. Defendants’ Bill of Exceptions, Defendants’ Amended Bill of Exceptions, Defendants’ Consolidated Bill of Exceptions; and the various Defendants’ Briefs and Defendants’ Supplementary Briefs--legal arguments addressed to the higher powers, pointing out the innumerable ways in which Judge Thayer had broken or overlooked the rules of the game.

When you read these, you could not see how “Web” had a leg to stand on; how any court could sustain the mass of evasions and falsehoods which he called his decisions. But apparently he had no worries about this; he was proclaiming his security to all and sundry. “Let them take it to the Supreme Court and see how far they’ll get!” He knew that if the court reversed him on grounds of prejudice, it would be equivalent to declaring him unfit for office. The chief justice came from Thayer’s home town of Worcester, where they are very clannish, being looked down upon by Boston. Long before the trial, at a public dinner to Thayer, this chief justice, Rugg, had made a speech paying tribute to Thayer, and telling how helpful Thayer had been to Rugg when Rugg was beginning law practice.

In January of 1926, three days were set for hearings before this august tribunal, and Cornelia visited the Court House in Boston, a dingy gray old building crowded into Pemberton Square--which in her girlhood had been a lovely little park, surrounded by fine old red brick mansions of the best families. The Supreme Court room was upstairs, simple, bare and gloomy as a tomb; Cornelia sat and watched a row of seven elderly gentlemen in black silk robes at their work of adjudging life or death. William G. Thompson was called upon to argue, and the little group of friends thrilled and exulted. But, alas, such thrills were not contagious, they did not affect the elderly gentlemen behind the high raised desks. They sat, like black-clad mummies; and in the course of the long argument, Cornelia observed one of them with head sunk forward and shoulders collapsed, perfectly peaceful. Poor old man, he was nearly eighty, but still needed the job.

The average age of these ultimate arbiters was sixty-eight, and increasing every year; several were ill a good part of the time, so that it was a rare event to see a full bench in session. That threw a double labor on the few who were capable. But there was no way to get rid of the old ones, for the greater their age, the less chance that they would think of a new idea; and what the owners of property wanted was to have all things legal and governmental stay as they were. If owners of property wanted anything, they could buy it; they did not have to call elderly black-clad mummies to their aid.

The Chief Justice, Rugg, sat in the center; oddly enough, he was the only young one, being fifty-four, handsome, alert, bland and smiling while he crushed counsel with his rulings. He had been an efficient county prosecutor, and an ardent reactionary, and this was his reward. As a trustee of Clark University, in his home town of Worcester, he was the ardent supporter of an academic clown who was turning a really distinguished graduate school into a laughing-stock of all scholars. Also he was a trustee of Amherst, and there had helped to oust one of the half dozen liberal college presidents in America.

Cornelia sat, her eyes roaming from one to another of the faces. She knew the names, she knew the family gossip, and would put this bit and that together. This one had been appointed by the governor who, after his term, became a vice-president of a great Boston bank; that other one the same. The family was venturing to hope that they were “safe” for a reversal of the Jerry Walker verdict. One was a Catholic, a former city solicitor; in matters concerning anarchism he would be tempted to stand by God and Cardinal O’Connell. One mumbled when he spoke, but Cornelia hoped his mind was still alert; also that he had not been affected by his acquaintance with Senator Crane, the respectable corruptionist who had collected the campaign funds of the rich. William Murray Crane, first governor and then United States Senator, had run Massachusetts politics in the interest of his own property and that of his friends. Had he made the mistake of overlooking the highest and most powerful of the courts?

Their enemies had not overlooked them; the men who answered corruption and class-arrogance with hate and blind destruction. During the days of the bomb-scares, somebody had planted a large one in a toilet in the court-house, close to the chambers where the august justices met. That was not merely a crime, it was an impropriety; and these old men would have been superhuman if they had not wanted to get hold of an anarchist, and teach a lesson to the others. The actual makers and planters of the bombs they could not punish, for these had changed their names and got away to Italy or South America--so the Department of Justice agents declared; but in Sacco and Vanzetti they had two who were at least friends and sympathizers.

On May 12th, 1926, the justices handed down their voluminous decision, in which they passed upon the Dedham trial and the exceptions thereto, and all the earlier motions for a new trial. Twenty-two thousand words of legal technicalities--fifty-six separate propositions which amounted to this: that Judge Thayer had been right in everything he had done, and that none of his discretionary rulings betrayed irrationality or corruption--something the defense had never claimed. To admit what the defense really claimed--that the judge had revealed a thoroughly prejudiced mind--would have meant to declare him unfit to hold his position; and that they would not do. From now on it would be the law of Massachusetts that a judge who desired to use his enormous discretionary power against accused persons might do so without fear of being reversed.

The plain truth was this: in other cases, where it seemed to the Supreme Judicial Court that prejudice had been displayed in a trial, they found a way to spare the feelings of the erring judge--finding some technical ground on which to order a new trial. Never had there been more prejudice, never more errors, than in this case; but for some reason known only to them, the elderly justices declined to employ their usual device.

A frightful blow for the defense; wiping out all the concealments of Katzmann, the bitter prejudice of Thayer, the confession of Proctor, the criminal career of Goodridge, the wobblings of Pelzer and Lola Andrews, the testimony of Gould--all legally dead forever! Shocking were the things which you might hear about the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from anarchists, and the aiders and abettors of anarchism, and their dupes like Cornelia Thornwell! She even got into a violent fuss with her son-in-law, Rupert Alvin--at least it was violent on Rupert’s part; Cornelia could not help laughing--it seemed to her the funniest thing that had yet come out of the case. Actually, the president of the Pilgrim National Bank declared his admiration for the great integrity of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts! And after all his efforts to tempt the court from virtue! “Really, my son,” said Cornelia, “there ought to be certain allowance for a sense of humor, even between a man and his mother-in-law! How long can you look at me with a straight face, knowing what you know that I know about our judges?”

Rupert tried to be sarcastic. “How can I tell what you think you know, since you have been associating exclusively with Reds?”

“No, my son, that won’t help you! What I know is not from Reds but from bankers. You forget that for many years I was privileged to sit in a room while a great leader of Boston finance discussed his private affairs with his father-in-law. I never paid attention to the details--I wish now that I had--but I assure you I noted the atmosphere, and sometimes I left the room because it was so unpleasant.”

“I defy you, Mother, ever to say that I have hinted at corruption in our judges!”

“If by corruption you mean selling their decisions for cash, as has happened in California and other states not so far away, I will grant that I have no evidence; but if you mean favoring our wealthy and powerful, if you mean protecting our ruling group in everything they do, then I say that the judges of our virtuous Commonwealth were appointed for that purpose and none other, and that their lives and records were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, before any one of them ever got started toward appointment. I have heard you scold a hundred times about the low quality of our political life, and the character of men who rise to high office in it.”

“Yes, Mother, but never the courts!”

“There is an old question which you hear asked in church, Rupert: do men gather figs from thistles? You know how many times we have heard of judges going with cap in hand to beg favor from some political boss--either Murray Crane, or the Democrat in charge. How many of our judges can you name who are really legal scholars, publicists, economists or statesmen? They are products of the spoils system--retired politicians, ex-district attorneys or city solicitors--tools of the big corporations, put there as reward for services. Most of them have spent a life-time protecting public service and accident insurance companies, upholding laws against labor, upholding vested privilege in every form. How many of them have been in your pay, Rupert, before they went on the bench?”

She waited; and then remarked with a smile, “You could count faster if you wanted to. I know of a judge who was counsel for a great banker fearing indictment for perjury--and I know that he got that banker off through a district attorney who was afterwards disbarred for malfeasance in office.”

Rupert showed a desire to withdraw from this unprofitable discussion; and his mother-in-law smiled.

“It was only in the most high-minded way, Rupert, I know! Our bankers name men who have been in their pay, and then it is the fiction that they forget gratitude! The public is expected to believe that men who have been truckling and time-serving politicians become spotless and noble-minded the moment they put on a black silk robe! But you know, and I know, that you are hoping for the Supreme Judicial Court to hand you Jerry Walker’s money. And you know that they are killing my two boys for threatening property rights in New England.”

The old evidence was wiped out, but new appeared to take its place and keep the case alive. First, the defense discovered Mrs. Kelly and Mrs. Kennedy, the two women who had looked out of a window on the bandit car, and had a perfect view of the one supposed to be Sacco. They had made to Fred Katzmann statements to the effect that Sacco was not the man, and Katzmann had kept this evidence from the defense for five years. Thompson now demanded the reports, but Katzmann’s successor, Ranney, was mysteriously unable to find them. This was the time for Ranney to appear before Thayer and deliver his cynical pronouncement: “I wonder if Mr. Thompson has not an exaggerated and too ethical notion of the functions of a district attorney!”

Then the Madeiros confession. Celestino F. Madeiros was a young Portuguese, member of a gang which had robbed a bank in Wrentham and killed the cashier. He was in Dedham jail while his appeal was being heard, and his conscience troubled him, he said, when Sacco’s wife came to the prison with the baby. On November 18th, 1925, he scribbled on a piece of paper: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime, and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.” He handed the paper to a trusty, who gave it to Nick.

A long investigation began. Madeiros told a detailed story of the South Braintree crime, but refusing to name any of his associates. However, a skilled lawyer knows how to get the facts out of a man, and the job was attributed to a group of freight-car thieves and hold-up men of Providence, known as the “Morelli gang.” Several of them were in jail, and their records were traced; Cornelia now studied the career of such persons as Bibba Barone, Steve the Pole, Gyp the Blood. Also she listened to more wrangling in the committee, because the anarchists resisted the efforts to pin the crime on the Morellis or anybody else. “What for we play polissman for state Massachusetts?”

But Thompson went ahead, and collected a mass of affidavits to be submitted in a motion for a new trial: which went the usual round, and served the purpose of keeping Sacco and Vanzetti alive for another year. Motion filed May, 1926; hearing before Judge Thayer, September; decision and appeal, October; argument before the Supreme Judicial Court, February, 1927; decision April, 1927; all very solemn and very expensive, with ancient legal phrases and complicated rules, making certain that no layman could be his own lawyer. Bart would watch the game, and joke with Cornelia; he was glad to be kept alive, of course--he could speak more words for the cause; but at the same time he begrudged the money, which might better have been spent for literature. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist wop, had become fond of William G. Thompson, the blue-blood lawyer, who was a learned and a great-hearted man. “But he is very naïve,” said Bart, gently; “he believe in the Supreme Court.”

The prisoner went on to explain. “It must be that way with a lawyer; he think he have to get his what you call them, precedents, right. He think if he can show how it was done before, then he has won. It is like chess--you ever play chess, Nonna?”

“My brother-in-law used to be a champion.”

“Well, you make move, you say ‘check’ and you have won. It is a game. But this is not a game, this is war. You say ‘check,’ and your enemy he knock the figures off the board, he throw them in your face.” As time passed, and the courts did this to the great lawyer, over and over again, Bart would remind Cornelia, and add, patiently, “I think some time they foolish Mr. Thompson.”

Then came the confessions of Letherman and Weyand--two agents of the Department of Justice, whose consciences had begun to trouble them. They had got out of the secret service now, the war upon the Reds being less active. They made affidavits, telling of the part which Federal agents had played in getting the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti. They said, in substance, that the Department had felt sure that Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty of the South Braintree crime, but that, since they were dangerous anarchists, it was desired to get them out of the way. The Department had turned over to the district attorney’s office a mass of evidence, in return for an agreement on the part of the district attorney to help the Department get information. There was much correspondence in the files of the Department in Boston which would show what had been done.

So the energies of the defense were turned to getting hold of these files. Thompson made application to the United States Attorney General, Cal Coolidge’s village lawyer from Vermont; a strong, silent protégé of a strong, silent statesman--and never more silent than now! Thompson did not get the files, and neither did anybody else get them. The attorney-general made no affidavit, and neither did any of his subordinates, and there was not a squeak from Fred Katzmann or Harold Williams, now a judge!

The motion for a new trial was argued before Judge Thayer in September of 1926. A great sight was William G. Thompson that day, for his moral sense was stirred, and he talked like an old-style prophet. He paid his regards to Fred Katzmann:

“Just think of what it means, if your Honor please! Think of what it means!

“Mr. Katzmann knew and knows to-day whether Fred Weyand and Lawrence Letherman told the truth. That truth is a truth of vital importance. Think what they say! The files of the Boston office are full of correspondence with Mr. Katzmann and of documents showing the closest coöperation between the Federal Agents and the District Attorney--not Stewart--the District Attorney in the preparation of this case. Every Federal agent who knew anything about it believed these men to be innocent of murder. ‘Every one of us believed they ought to be deported. They were anarchists, they did not believe in organized government or private property.’

“Oh, how those words will ring around this world, ‘private property’! Think what is going to be said about it! The man who does not believe in private property in America may be killed whether he is guilty or not. That is going to be said from one end of the world to the other if this thing is allowed to go through. Can we afford it? I do not care how high an opinion your Honor has of Mr. Katzmann. It may be he was misled. Far be it from me to make any further or other attack on Mr. Katzmann than simply what the facts warrant. He has remained silent in the face of those accusations. Nothing that I can say is more eloquent than that silence. I desire to say nothing in addition to that silence.”

VII

So much for the district attorney; and then Thompson turned his attention to the village lawyer from Vermont, the strong, silent protégé of a strong, silent statesman. Said he:

“And what do you say of the refusal to produce those papers? Take all the circumstances, sir.... We have got a telegram from New York, but we cannot get the papers in those Boston files. What inference does your Honor tell the jury may fairly be drawn against a man if he is an humble man who is in the possession of relevant evidence and refuses to produce it? Do you tell them that it is going to help him or that it is going to hurt him?

“Is there anything so exalted in the office of the Attorney General of the United States that the inference that you draw against any other men who hold back documentary evidence should not be drawn in this case? I am not talking about him personally, of course; I am talking about him in his official capacity. Personally, I have no doubt he is an admirable citizen. But there is some reason of strong policy why those papers are not produced here. What can that reason be? What can it be? Are you going to say because Sacco and Vanzetti are Italians, because they are poor folks, because they are aliens, because they have no constitutional rights we will let Mr. Sargent hold back what might set them free?”

And then Thompson turned upon Katzmann’s successor, Ranney, who had argued that the “secrets” of the Department of Justice were sacred and must be protected! Said Thompson:

“What are these secrets which they admit? They have then admitted secrets, have they? There are secrets, are there? I thought there were from the fact that it was not denied or contradicted. And I will say to your Honor that a government which has come to value its own secrets more than it does the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny, whether you call it a republic, a monarchy, or anything else. Secrets! Secrets! And he says you should abstain from touching this verdict of your jury because it is so sacred. Would they not have liked to know something about the secrets? The case is admitted by that inadvertent concession. There are then secrets to be admitted....

“Mr. Ranney says that I have argued that all these Federal agents ought to be in jail. I was not so bold as to make that suggestion, if your Honor please. All I ventured to call your Honor’s attention to was the fact that one of them already was in jail, namely, our friend, Shaughnessey, sentenced for twelve years for highway robbery, a man who was then investigating Sacco and Vanzetti, and going around with a badge of the United States on him as his authority so to do. I do not suggest what ought to be done to these agents. I do say, as a citizen, that it is a shame that Weiss, a man capable of making the suggestions that he made, and doing the things that he did in this case, should still be wearing the uniform of the United States and boldly operating around this town, and not even taking the trouble to come in here and deny these charges.”

VIII

All that got under “Web” Thayer’s skin most frightfully; you had only to watch his gray withered face and trembling hands while he listened. It made him so furious that he took only five weeks to write his decision--instead of the year he had been requiring hitherto! There were persons who believed that the reason for the Sacco-Vanzetti conviction had been ill-mannered I.W.W. lawyers from the wild and woolly west; but here was a respectable lawyer, one of the leaders of the Boston bar; and here was “Web” raging at him, with elaborate and complicated sneers such as “Web” loved, and which exhibited his learning, not merely in the legal field, but in the medical. Said “Web”:

“Since the trial before the jury of these cases, a new type of disease would seem to have developed. It might be called ‘lego-psychic neurosis’ or ‘hysteria’ which means: ‘a belief in the existence of something which in fact and truth has no such existence.’ ... This disease would seem to have reached a very dangerous condition, from the argument of counsel, upon the present motion, when he charges Mr. Sargent, Attorney-General of the United States and his subordinates, and subordinates of Former-Attorney-General of the United States Mr. Palmer and Mr. Katzmann and the District Attorney of Norfolk County, with being in a conspiracy to send these two defendants to the electric chair, not because they are murderers but because they are radicals.... This would seem to be a very low estimate of the District Attorney and his assistants. The physician, ordinarily, in diagnosing a disease, seeks to ascertain the length of time the symptoms have existed, with a view of ascertaining how deep-seated the disease is and whether it is curable or not. In these cases, from all the developed symptoms, the Court is rather of the opinion that the disease is absolutely without cure.”

But the most amazing thing in that amazing decision was what the learned judge had to say about the issue of “radicalism,” and the part it had played in the trial. Defending himself, with his back to the wall, “Web” cited some dialogue which he said had passed between Katzmann and Sacco. But you searched in the transcript of the testimony for that passage, and couldn’t find it. You would go back and search some more--you must have skipped a page, it must be there somewhere. You would get others to search--until finally it had become certain that “Web’s” citation was invented! So much progress “Judge Fury” had made since the days of the Dedham trial, when his utmost daring had been to present Frank Sibley with a page from the transcript with a passage cut out. But now he concocted passages, and inserted them in his decisions, in quotation marks, to be printed in the law-books, and handed down to the scorn and fury of all future times! Said Mr. Justice Thayer, in his rôle of fiction-writer:

“Mr. Sacco said that he feared punishment, that he was afraid of deportation, that he did not want to go back to Italy, that he had told all these falsehoods because of his fear. Mr. Katzmann, in his cross-examination, brought out all these facts and then he asked this question: ‘Mr. Sacco, you say you feared deportation and that is why you told all these lies and why you did what you did?’ and Mr. Sacco said ‘Yes.’ Then came the next question: ‘Mr. Sacco, at the very time when you were telling these lies, you had already secured a passport for Italy on which you, your wife, and two children were to sail two days after the night of your arrest?’ and the answer was ‘Yes.’”--Not a word of that in the record!

Incidents such as this furnished propaganda for the radical and labor press. No need of comment--they were their own comment. The story spread, in wider and wider circles. Pierre Leon, in Paris, would publish in his paper everything that was sent to him, and it would be taken up by socialist and communist agencies, and translated into a dozen languages, and made the subject of editorials and protest meetings all over the world.

The little group in Boston, laboring in obscurity and despair, had accomplished more than they knew. Their propaganda had influenced many thousands whose names they would never know. In part it was the natural drama of the case, the contrasts and thrills supplied by the Great Novelist; in part it was the personality of Vanzetti. Joe Randall had been right when he said, at that first meeting in Plymouth Jail: “The police have given us a good martyr.” For five years Bart had been tried in the fire, and he had stood the test; it would be hard to say how any man could have stood it better. Outside, in times of excitement, he had been fanatical and violent; but now those faults were remedied by prison bars; now he was of necessity the student and thinker. He met persons of the cultivated class, and learned that they, too, were concerned about “joostice.” Without weakening in the cause of his beloved proletariat, he came to understand that goodness is not a matter of class, and that love can break down as many barriers as greed can set up.

He was gentle, he was wise, and he was dignified. The humiliations of prison life had failed to affect him; he had conquered his jailers. A few days after his arrest, Mike Stewart, bluff and burly, had patted him on the back and called him “Bertie”; but now the guards understood that he was a superior man, and before his death the life of the prison had come to revolve about him. He sat for many hours a day in his cell, writing letters; and the least of these bore the stamp of his personality. He had a style now--both in English and Italian. To a friend he wrote:

“I have been told that the Italian is one of the most beautiful of languages: to me it is: it is my mother’s language: it is the angelic language to me. Yet all languages are beautiful when they voice the beautiful, the good and the true. Your words are harmonious and sweet to me as friendship’s voice is--they are music, the vibration of life.”

Always thinking of others; with that natural courtesy which springs from a kind heart. To a rancher’s wife on the Pacific coast he wrote:

“By the solidarity of the workers, friends, and comrades I always have money to enable me to buy some food and fruits, cheese, etc., when the institution food does not agree with me. I am satisfied with what I have. Very often I think while eating of some starved human creatures and I feel a little ashamed though I have always done my part to assure a piece of bread to each mouth. So please do not be excessively troubled for me. Good sentiments and friendly words are most necessary to me--and you are very most prodigal.”

So he said; but in truth he needed more than sentiments and words; he needed the bosom of that Mother Nature whom he loved with a passion both filial and romantic. When he heard that Cornelia was visiting Plymouth, he wrote to her: “Oh! that sea, that sky, those freed and full of life winds of Cape Cod! Maybe I will never see, never breathe, never be at one with them again!” He poured out the anguish of his effort to know and to achieve--in spite of terrifying handicaps:

“Exactly talking, I am not busy in writing but in trying to write. For, the prison’s spell is telling its story also on me, and how so! It seems to be increasing my understanding and diminishing my power of expression. In fact ... it is ... an experience all right! but an experience that undermines the life, straight to its sources and centers so that as long as consciousness and memory are not yet weaken, you can realized something ... but, as to express oneself at one’s best one has to be at one’s best while after such experience one is not any longer at his best! he can not any longer express himself at the best of his power. These are the reasons why I am busy in trying to write and writting very little at all. Oftentimes I manouvired hard to write down what I wish; then, reaching it I perceive that it does not says what I mean and I torn the writting in many little pieces.

“The crux of this inner drama is not only about expression ... it is that I doubt my own thoughts, my opinions, my feeling, my sentiments, believes and ideas. I am sure of nothing, I know nothing. When I think of a thing and try to understand it, I see that in the time in the space and in the matter that thing is, both before and after, related to so many other things that I, following its relations, both backward and forward, see it disappear in the ocean of the unknown and myself lost in it. It is easy to create a universal sistem, to human minds; that is why we are blessed by so many of universal sistems while no one know what a bed-buck is.”

Cornelia would visit Charlestown and discuss these high metaphysical problems with Bart, and then she would go to tea-parties and dinners in the Back Bay, and tell her blue-blood friends about this philosophical fish-peddler, and now and then persuade one to call upon him. So gradually the class-lines were broken down in Boston, and strange things happened--things which could not have been duplicated anywhere else in the world. For example, the Madeiros reprieve, and the way it was engineered!

The Madeiros motion for a new trial, turned down by Thayer, was in process of appeal to the Supreme Court. But meantime, the mills of the law were threatening to grind up the principal witness! Madeiros was scheduled to be executed for the Wrentham bank murder, and if he were to die, what would be left of the “Madeiros motion”? The Governor of the Commonwealth was asked to postpone the execution, and he refused to act. By what means could his hard heart be moved?

Cornelia went to call upon a certain venerable lady, one of the oldest inhabitants of Beacon Hill, tremendously looked up to, even though she took no part in politics or practical affairs. Hardly anything in her home less than a hundred years old--except the occupant, who was ninety-something, and regarded Cornelia Thornwell as one of the young matrons. A shrine of respectability, with a little wizened female deity in a faded black silk dress, to whom Cornelia told her troubles--the losing struggle she was waging with politicians and bankers and business men who thought they were protecting society and upholding order when they took a chance on killing innocent men. See what was happening to a fine, upright lawyer like William G. Thompson, who was being abused up and down for daring to defend two anarchists!

The old, old lady listened, and then said, “My dear, the trouble is, these persons don’t know Boston history. Tell them what John Adams and the first Josiah Quincy did.”

“What is that?”

“You don’t know history either! When the British soldiers were indicted for murder after the Boston massacre, John Adams and Josiah Quincy defended them, to be sure they had a fair trial.”

“Did that really happen?” exclaimed Cornelia.

“Yes, indeed, my dear, you can look it up in the books. If you want to make any headway in Boston, why don’t you really find out about us?”

It happened that at this time a New York newspaper had sent its labor editor to study the Madeiros case. This man had come with the usual prejudices, but convinced himself against his will that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. He wanted to do something to help, and Cornelia told him of this colonial precedent. Seeing the chance, he took it to one of the most bitter reactionaries in Boston, a man whom Cornelia herself would never have approached, for she knew that he had put up, out of his private purse, more than half a million dollars for the war upon the “Reds.”

This powerful person, who had been demanding a quick death for Sacco and Vanzetti, was confronted with that sacred precedent, and felt himself rebuked. Had John Adams and the first Josiah Quincy really done such a thing? If it was true, he would do no less! He would write or call upon the Governor, and ask for a reprieve of the Madeiros sentence! He did so; and the result was, the reprieve was granted, and Sacco and Vanzetti got another six months in which to make their impression upon the world!

Seven years had passed since the felt plants of Jerry Walker had been taken from him by Henry Cabot Winters and Rupert Alvin and the rest of the “Pilgrim National crowd.” Two years had passed since the jury had brought in that tremendous verdict of ten and one-half million dollars in Mr. Walker’s favor. In the course of seven years the new owners had made more than that amount of money out of the properties; but still Mr. Walker had not got a penny. The case had been appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, and at last, in the fall of 1926, the seven old gentlemen in black silk robes were ready to hear the argument. A great event in the legal world of Boston: the highest priced lawyers in the city pitted against one another, for the highest stakes in history. You might be sure that none of the elderly judges would fall asleep this time! They listened day after day, while more than two thousand “exceptions” were explained and debated before them; the mere brief of the plaintiff filled three printed volumes.

The wrangling over, the seven judges took their seven heads full of arguments, and the printed briefs and the huge “bill of exceptions,” to meditate and discuss among themselves. Three or four months they would need to make up their minds; but--a dreadful circumstance, almost blasphemy to mention--Rupert and Henry thought that they foresaw the outcome! In strictest secrecy the word went the rounds of the family; no need to worry, everything was going to be all right!

And so it proved. On the ninth of March, 1927, the black-clad justices spoke the final word on the Jerry Walker case: declaring that the verdict of the jury had been an error, and that the trial judge should have directed a verdict for the banker-bandits. From this time forth all banker-bandits who desired to put pistols to the heads of businessmen need only have to take the precaution to make the businessmen sign a paper forgiving them for the action.

An amazing decision for a court which was forbidden to deal with the facts, and claimed that it never did so! The release which Jerry Walker had been induced to sign, at the time that he had parted with his properties, had been an obvious part of the conspiracy; he had signed it in ignorance of what had been done to him, and one consideration of the release had been his parting with more of his property. So the jury had decided; but now the august justices stepped in and declared that this was not so; the conspiracy had been over before the release was signed, and “no fraud or duress entered into the execution of the release.” In order to say this, they had to do exactly what “Web” Thayer had done so many times in the Sacco-Vanzetti case; that is, to shut their eyes to a mass of testimony which stood in the record. When it came to sparing the rich or condemning the poor, all judges appeared to be alike.

A great relief to the masters of the Boston banking-ring. No longer need they fear having to part with most of their wealth acquired during the last few years! They patted the old boys of the court on the back at lunch-time in the Union Club, and told them that they were true friends of sound and conservative business. All right to talk about the case now; neither would there be any harm if you offered to take a son or a favorite nephew into the bank at a generous salary. In time of peace prepare for war!

Jerry Walker’s legal bull-dog was raising a howl, and talking about appealing to the United States Supreme Court; but that was all rubbish, said Henry Cabot Winters--the Federal courts would never take jurisdiction. He went about among his friends and took his share of the back-patting. The great bankers and lawyers who had made faces at him now began to make smiles. Since they were to keep the money, they would manage to forgive him for having forced it upon them.

John Quincy Thornwell was in Paris at the time of the decision, and Henry sent him a cablegram which was the talk of Boston clubs and drawing-rooms for many a day thereafter. “Tout est sauvé sauf l’honneur,” said Henry. Since the World War all Boston blue-bloods know French--or they have secretaries who help them pretend to. The humorless president of the Fifth National Bank of Boston would find somebody to translate and explain those shining words: “All is saved but honor!” Goethe made the remark that every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold; but Mr. Jerry Walker operated upon the modern scale, with splendor suited to the masters of mechanized production; he had paid ten and one-half million dollars for that bon mot of the Back Bay!

XII

Property was safe, so now there was time to think about life. The seven black-robed old gentlemen got to work on the Madeiros motion in the Sacco-Vanzetti case--the last chance for a new trial. They had been stung by world-wide criticism of the law’s delay, and wanted to get the matter over, so that Massachusetts might have peace again. The motion had been argued in February, and on April 5th came the unbelievable opinion: Judge Thayer’s decision, like all his other decisions in the case, had been “in his own discretion,” and it was to stand! All lawyers commented upon the amazing contrast with the Jerry Walker decision, less than one month earlier. When it was a question of safeguarding the lives of workingmen, the Supreme Judicial Court held itself powerless to deal with the facts, and could only pass on the judge’s interpretation of law. “Finding no error, the verdicts are to stand.” But when it was a question of protecting the property of bankers, the court had not hesitated to set aside the verdict, and to declare that the jury had been unjustified in drawing the conclusions it had seen fit to draw.

The decision was written by Justice Wait, who had begun his public career as an alderman of the city of Boston--an occupation which leaves a man in no ignorance as to the relationship between business and politics, and the power of big money in American affairs. Immediately after the decision was made public, his home was put under guard, and the homes of all the other judges, district attorney and officials. Judge Thayer’s home had been guarded for the past nine months, and a husky detective followed him everywhere he went.

It was “Web’s” hour of triumph, and he made the most of it. His cries of exultation echoed through the dining-rooms of Worcester and Boston clubs. He would button-hole acquaintances on the golf-links, and boast of his perfect knowledge of legal precedents. “I told them they couldn’t put it over on me! I wasn’t going to be intimidated by anybody or anything! I told those damned fools they couldn’t hoodwink me! I represent the integrity of the courts of Massachusetts, and I shall see that the integrity is maintained! I taught a lesson to that long-haired arnychist from California! Yes, and I’ll teach a lesson to the people who are raising money and slandering the courts of this Commonwealth!”

A prominent member of the Worcester Country Club came out to his car and told his family and friends how he had just been one of a group of men to whom “Web” had been holding forth, referring to Sacco and Vanzetti as “those bastards down there,” as “Bolsheviki,” and saying that he would “get them good and proper”; that he would “show them and get those guys hanged. No Bolsheviki can intimidate Web Thayer!” In one of the clubs of Boston a horrified whisper went the rounds--a United States senator had said to the steward in the dining-room: “If you let Judge Thayer come to my table again, I’ll have you fired.” The “blue-bloods” shook their heads and said it was a consequence of the low type of men who were being appointed to the bench. But even so, the courts must be upheld!

“Web” and the district attorney, who knew all tricks of the law, were quick as a tiger in their next spring. No other appeals were on file; and if “Web” sentenced the men, he would clinch the case. After sentence had been passed, no other judge of the Superior Court could take jurisdiction, and “Web” would be the undisputed master. On April 9th, four days after the Supreme Court’s decision, he had the two “Bolsheviki” brought to Dedham court-house, with the round white dome and portholes like an ocean liner, and had them locked safe in their cage--the same from which they had gazed at him six years ago through a period of seven weeks. With rustling black robes he emerged from his chamber, and took his seat upon his throne: a frail old man, more withered than ever; badly scared, yet clinging desperately to his dignity in this great hour of triumph. Lawyers and spectators looking up to him, a score or two of armed men protecting him--inside the court-room with automatic revolvers on their hips, outside on the steps with rifles in hand. “I represent the integrity of the courts of Massachusetts!”

XIII

“Nicola Sacco, stand up,” said the clerk of the court; and Nick rose, pale and haggard, dressed in his best black go-to-court suit.

“Nicola Sacco, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?”

Poor Nick, he knew many reasons, which he wanted to shout to all the world. But his friends had advised him that he could produce no impression in a Yankee court-room, because of his blundering English. He had made up his mind to let Bart speak for him; but standing before that gray old man who had tortured him for six years; seeing the row of newspaper men, with eager pencils poised, ready to flash his words to the farthest ends of the earth--such a temptation was too much for a propagandist soul. Nineteen years Nicola Sacco had been in America, driven, humiliated, repressed; and here for the second time in his life America was ready to listen. He spoke; and the court reporter and the newspaper men kindly straightened out his dialect, and the world read:

“Yes, sir. I am not an orator. It is not very familiar with me the English language, and as I know, as my friend has told me, my comrade Vanzetti will speak more long, so I thought to give him the chance.

“I never knew, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this Court. After seven years’ prosecuting they still consider us guilty. And these gentle people here are arrayed with us in this Court to-day.

“I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize them and kill them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That is why I am here to-day on this bench, for having been of the oppressed class. Well, you are the oppressor.

“You know it, Judge Thayer--you know all my life, you know why I have been here, and after seven years that you have been persecuting me and my poor wife, and you still to-day sentence us to death. I would like to tell all my life, but what is the use?”

It was no use whatever, and so Nicola Sacco sat down.

XIV

“Bartolomeo Vanzetti, stand up,” said the clerk of the court; and the other figure in the cage stood up: thin, worn, and partly bald, but with the droopy mustache as big as ever; a large, loose figure in a neat black suit with a little black silk tie.

“Bartolomeo Vanzetti, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?”

“Yes,” said Bart, quietly.

And now he would reap the reward of those years of hard work in his lonely cell; of his practice writing letters, and treatises on syndicalism, and an autobiography, and a novel, and a translation of Proudhon, and even a poem about a nightingale! Bart would be able to find words; with hesitation now and then, but not too much; with mispronunciation enough to be picturesque, but not enough to be offensive. Quietly, firmly, he spoke, as one who has meditated long upon his ideas; as one who was addressing posterity, rather than the casual few in a court-room. Posterity, hear him!

“What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stolen and I have never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stolen, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.

“Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not need to go into the streets and kill a man or try to take money. I can live by my two hands and live well. But besides that, I can live even without work with my hands for other people. I have had plenty of chance to live independently and to live what the world conceives to be a higher life than to gain our bread with the sweat of our brow.

“My father in Italy is in a good condition. I could have come back in Italy and he would have welcomed me every time with open arms. Even if I come back there with not a cent in my pocket, my father could have give me a position, not to work but to make business, or to oversee upon the land that he owns.... But I have refused myself of what are considered the commodity and glories of life, the prides of a life of a good position, because in my consideration it is not right to exploit man. I have refused to go in business because I understand that business is a speculation on profit upon certain people that must depend upon the business man, and I do not consider that that is right and therefore I refuse to do that.

“Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in my life--though some sins but not crimes--not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the moral law condemns, but also the crime that the moral law and the official law sanction and sanctify,--the exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes can doom me, it is this reason and none else....

“We have proved that there could not have been another judge on the face of the earth more prejudiced, more cruel and more hostile than you have been against us. We have proven that. Still they refuse the new trial. We know, and you know in your heart, that you have been against us from the very beginning, before you see us. Before you see us you already know that we were radicals, that we were underdogs, that we were the enemy of the institutions that you can believe in good faith in their goodness--I don’t want to discuss that--and that it was easy at the time of the first trial to get a verdict of guilty.

“We know that you have spoken yourself, and have spoke your hostility against us, and your despisement against us with friends of yours on the train, at the University Club of Boston, at the Golf club of Worcester. I am sure that if the people who know all what you say against us have the civil courage to take the stand, maybe Your Honor--I am sorry to say this because you are an old man, and I have an old father--but maybe you would be beside us in good justice at this time....

“We believe more now than ever that war is wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind, ‘Look out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. For what? All that they say to you, all that they have promised to you--it was a lie, it was an illusion, it was a cheat, it was a fraud, it was a crime. They promised you liberty. Where is liberty? They promised you prosperity. Where is prosperity? They have promised you elevation. Where is the elevation?’

“From the day that I went in Charlestown, the misfortunate, the population of Charlestown, has doubled in number. Where is the moral good that the war has given to the world? Where is the spiritual progress that we have achieved from the war? Where are the security of life, the security of the things that we possess for our necessity? Where is the respect for human life? Where are the respect and the admiration for the good characteristics and the good of the human nature? Never before the war as now have there been so many crimes, so much corruption, so much degeneration as there is now.

“This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth--I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that you can only kill me once but if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.

“I have finished. Thank you.”

It was “Web” Thayer’s turn. He, too, rose to speak. As it turned out, he rose to apologize; to plead that it was not his fault. A singular fact, which Vanzetti had noted about the legal machinery of the august Commonwealth--he had commented upon it to Cornelia--that everybody put the responsibility on somebody else! The arresting policemen had said it was not their fault, they had been obeying the orders of their superiors. The jailers one and all said the same thing. The chief officer of the jail had said that the higher powers would not permit this and that. Members of the jury had said that they had had to follow the instructions of the learned judge. And now here was the learned judge--at the very crisis of events--putting the blame upon the jury! The Supreme Judicial Court had said that the trial judge had had the final say as to the facts. And now here was the trial judge putting the responsibility upon the Supreme Judicial Court!

Could it be that even “Web,” the insensitive, had been awed by the majesty of Vanzetti’s words? Could it be that “Web,” the vainglorious, was assailed by a doubt about himself? Be that as it may, the braggart was gone from his manner, and his voice was no longer a thin strip of steel, but trembling and mumbling. He said:

“Under the law of Massachusetts, the jury says whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. The Court has absolutely nothing to do with that question. The law of Massachusetts provides that a judge cannot deal in any way with the facts. As far as he can go under our law is to state the evidence.

“During the trial many exceptions were taken. Those exceptions were taken to the Supreme Judicial Court. That Court, after examining the entire record, after examining all the exceptions--that Court in its final words said, ‘The verdicts of the jury should stand; exceptions overruled.’ That being true there is only one thing that this Court can do. It is not a matter of discretion. It is a matter of statutory requirement, and that being true there is only one duty that now devolves upon this Court, and that is to pronounce the sentence.

“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.

“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo Vanzetti....”

Here Vanzetti broke in: “Wait a minute, please, Your Honor. May I speak a minute with my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?”

Said Thompson: “I do not know what he has to say.”

Said Judge Thayer: “I think I should pronounce the sentence ... Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of death....”

But here came Nick, with one of his wild cries: “You know I am innocent. Those are the same words I pronounced six years ago. You condemn two innocent men.”

But the mumbling voice went on, in the solemn legal formula: “... by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.” It was customary for the judge to add, “And may God have mercy on your souls.” But for some reason Judge Thayer omitted this part of the formula.

XVIII. THE SUPERSALESMAN

Cornelia Thornwell would wake up in the middle of the night, trembling, in a cold sweat. They were going to murder Bart and Nick! Impossible to fool herself any longer; they did actually intend to do it!

For hours she would lie, evolving plans; going over in her mind the names of persons she knew who might be capable of a concern for either justice or mercy. She would turn on the light by her bedside and make notes of things to be done during the day. Betty and Joe, who now lived in the next apartment, would come in at daylight and find her writing letters. Impossible to rest!

There being no more hope from the courts, the energies of the defense were turned to the Governor of the Commonwealth, who had the power to pardon, or to commute the sentences to life-imprisonment. Legally, his power was subject to the consent of his “council,” a sort of state cabinet; but then, he had power over this “council,” being what was known as a “strong” man, accustomed to having his own way.

Alvan Tufts Fuller was his name, and he had begun life as a trick bicycle-rider and racer. He went into the bicycle-repair business, and prospered, and when the bicycle gave way to the automobile, he stayed on the top of the wave, and obtained the agency for the Packard car in New England, and also in Pennsylvania, and of the Cadillac car in New England. Upon every machine sold in these territories he received twenty per cent of the purchase price. Since the Packard limousine was a five thousand dollar car, it amounted to a great sum, in the neighborhood of two million dollars a year. “Allie” Fuller, trick bicycle-rider, was now the richest man in New England; authorities differed as to whether his fortune was twenty millions or forty, but as a rule they guessed the higher sum.

He had begun his political career as a “Roosevelt Progressive,” but that thin veneer had worn off quickly. He had been elected to Congress for two terms, but had been too busy to attend the sessions--except when it was necessary to make a speech denouncing the “Reds.” He had served four years as lieutenant-governor, and had earned the enmity of the Thornwell clan by insisting upon an exposure of Rupert Alvin’s purchase of the legislature in connection with the Elevated Railway bill. Fuller played the rôle of an “independent” in politics, stern and incorruptible; he made a grand gesture of refusing to take his salary--thereby obtaining advertisement worth many times the amount. He wanted the legislators and officials to have the same scorn for small sums of money; if they had possessed an income of two millions a year, they would doubtless have obliged him. As it was, they took their salaries of fifteen hundred dollars, and eked them out by means of tips from the lobbyists who swarmed to the State House, or the hotel-rooms nearby.

The system of universal graft which is American government was going on, and Fuller knew that it was going on. Once in a while some “reformer” or “crank” or “sore-head” would force an exposure, whereupon the lieutenant-governor would leap up and make a fuss in the papers, and the public would know that they had an honest public servant. The statements he made got him into trouble; the Speaker of the House sued him for slander and won a verdict--only to have it upset by the Supreme Court. But Fuller got the advertising and on the basis of it became Chief Executive of the Commonwealth--the great master of millions condescending to play the game of democratic politics. The procedure consisted of going about shaking hands with grimy workingmen who thought he was still the bicycle repairer of thirty years ago. Hale and hearty, full of animal magnetism, with a rough exterior and a “golden heart,” he kept the admiration of the “plain people.” To the starving strikers of Fall River he began a campaign speech, “I am not a politician”--and they believed him. “I am no orator,” he would say--and doubtless meant it, not knowing that this was a device explained in every treatise on oratory.

A typical specimen of the “strong man” in American affairs; a competent executive, a driver of other men, but utterly devoid of ideas, and incapable of thinking except in current tags. He had known all his life what he wanted, and had gone after it and got it. To a salesman of Packard automobiles, the human race is sharply divided into two parts: those who have the money to buy Packard automobiles, and those who have not. To the former, “Allie” Fuller would come forward smiling and voluble, his mentality concentrated upon flattery and “service.” To that far greater number whose costume and manners make clear that they have not the price of a Packard car and never will have it, the attitude is one of indifference, except just prior to election day.

This supersalesman of automobiles was as cold as marble; utterly selfish, and lacking not merely in the finer feelings, but even in the common every-day kindness, of which politicians often have too much. No friend, no matter how intimate, ever got a discount on a car. In politics he granted no quarter; he gave the punishment and took none. In business he was the modern slave-driver with a fountain-pen instead of a whip. When, after the war, the workers in his repair and body-factory came to him, pleading humbly that on account of the increase in the cost of living they could not get along on a wage of twenty-five dollars a week, he gave them a brutal refusal. There was a strike, which was embarrassing to an ambitious politician in later years. But no diminution of that two million dollar a year income!

Such is the way by which “strong” men build up fortunes; and then they sit on the heap, regarding with instant instinctive hostility any one who suggests that there is any other ideal in life, or any other duty. And now such a man was called upon to decide the issue of life or death for Nicola Sacco, who had stood up in court and said: “I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other.” He was to decide the issue of life or death for Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had stood up in the same court and said: “I have refused myself of what are considered the commodity and glories of life, the prides of a life of a good position, because in my consideration it is not right to exploit man.”

The Madeiros confession, the Letherman and Weyand confessions, Judge Thayer’s decision, with its tone of raving--all these had brought a new element into the Sacco-Vanzetti case. So-called “decent” people--that is, people who had money, but nevertheless believed in fair play--were shocked by a too-obvious demonstration of class justice. One by one the few daily newspapers in America which profess a trace of liberalism were persuaded to investigate the case, and one by one they took up the campaign for a new trial.

The Springfield Republican, the only liberal daily in New England, pleaded the cause. The Boston Herald published an editorial, which won the Pulitzer prize for the best newspaper editorial of 1926. “As months have merged into years, and the great debate over the case has continued, our doubts have solidified slowly into convictions, and reluctantly we have found ourselves compelled to reverse our original judgment.” That gave a terrible shock to Boston conservatism; for substantial persons who didn’t read the Globe in the morning read the Herald, and such an editorial interfered with the digestion of cod-fish balls. A friend of Governor Fuller’s met him on his way to the State House that morning and said, “Have you seen that the Herald has come out for a new trial for those wops?” Said His Excellency, “What? Has the Herald fallen for that bunk?”

Now had come the death sentence; and all those energies of protest which had been centered upon the courts were turned upon the Chief Executive. “Write to Governor Fuller! Wire to Governor Fuller!” said the bulletins and appeals of the defense committee. The State House was inundated by a flood of mail. It came, literally by the bushel-basket full, several times every day. The best brains of the world, the finest and most sensitive spirits, laid aside their work and composed appeals, of a sort which they imagined might stir the conscience and influence the judgment of the chief executive of a great Commonwealth. They spent money upon telegrams and cablegrams, they wrote letters for which a collector of autographs would have paid large sums of money; and what became of the product of their efforts?

The defense committee received a letter addressed to the Governor, signed by a dozen or more labor members of the British Parliament, asking him to do what he could to bring about a new trial. Gardner Jackson, Amherst graduate and a presentable person, was selected to deliver the document, and he took the precaution to take along the State House reporter for the Boston Globe, to introduce him.

His Excellency was not in, and they met his efficient private secretary. To him Jackson handed the letter from the members of Parliament, and the secretary took one glance at it, and burst out: “Oh, those God-damn crooks! Do you think we pay any attention to this stuff? It comes in here by the barrelful and we immediately chuck it into the fire.” Then he turned upon the reporter, demanding, “What do you mean by bringing this fellow up here on a matter like this? First thing you know, those God-damn wops will be getting out and coming to live near you in Brookline. How would you like that?” It was a witticism, and the secretary laughed loudly, and threw the letter back at Gardner Jackson.

Such was the agent through whose hands would pass everything which came to the Governor on the case. When documents of great urgency were entrusted to him, and it was discovered several days later that the Governor had never seen nor heard of them, the defense committee would be infuriated, and would blame the secretary for failure of their hopes. But Joe Randall would laugh--he was furnishing labor papers with news on the case, and was up at the State House at all hours of the day and night, meeting the other reporters and hearing the gossip. “Don’t fool yourself, Nonna!” said he--cynical young “Red.” “The secretary forgets what Fuller doesn’t want to have remembered. He is paid two salaries to serve as the goat, and have us blame him instead of his boss!”

Alas for blue-blood ladies, who left the refinements of an exclusive home, and mixed themselves in the public affairs of capitalist society! Cornelia Thornwell was now seventy-two years of age, and her hair was snow-white, and her step no longer firm--she had to be helped upstairs now and then. And here she was, forced to measure her wits against a supersalesman of automobiles and his entourage. Startling were the tales which Joe Randall brought home about the goings on of the “State House gang.” Down underneath the beautiful golden dome there was a cellar, stocked with liquors confiscated by the state police; and the heads of this “gang” were presenting the stuff or selling it to all and sundry, including the state legislators. Still more dreadful, to the mind of an old-fashioned lady, some of this crowd were using the state police boat, the Lotus, for what the newspaper slang termed “orgies”--drunken parties with women. All the reporters knew about it--but the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti had to wait until nine months after the wops were in their graves, before a disgruntled employee at the State House spilled the Boston beans to some prying clergymen, and an investigation was forced.

III

Cornelia Thornwell belonged to the little group of those who have a right to know. Therefore she went to her son-in-law, Henry Cabot Winters, and asked him to find out for her the Chief Executive’s real attitude toward the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and what he intended to do. It was only a month after the Jerry Walker victory, and Henry was his old genial self again, pleased to have a call from his Bolshevik mother-in-law. He reported his relations with the Governor to be fairly good; he had not joined with Rupert in his row--the canny Rupert had warned him not to, for in the game of politics you can never tell at what hour your deadly enemy may become your best friend.

The great lawyer would go up to the State House, and not merely find out, but put in a word for some form of executive clemency, as a matter of political tactics. So much Cornelia had been able to accomplish by twelve years of radical propaganda in her family! She was deeply grateful, and went home and prepared a fine dinner for her son-in-law, with ribs of spring lamb, and new potatoes and green peas, and strawberries from Georgia.

But alas, the news which Henry brought completely spoiled the dinner for them both! Cornelia hardly ate a mouthful, and Henry made a poor pretense. “I’m sorry, Mother,” he said, “but you’ve got to steel yourself to the worst. There is no chance of saving your two boys.”

Cornelia went white, and her soft brown eyes were wide with horror. “Henry, why?”

“Well, the police have got to Fuller, and he’s heard all the worst about your anarchists. I don’t think there’s any power in the world that can change his opinion.”

“What has he heard, Henry?”

“All the things I’ve told you before: that they were dynamiters, and were hiding dynamite on the night of their arrest.”

“But, Henry, they weren’t even accused of that!”

“I know--not publicly; but it’s the real reason they were prosecuted, and the reason they were convicted, and Fuller has got it fixed in his mind. ‘Bad actors,’ he calls them.”

“Then he’s going to execute men for one crime, because he’s heard rumors they committed another!”

“As a matter of fact, Mother, he is equally convinced they were bandits, too. He’s been told that the money went to Italy, to make a revolution there. They’ve even told him rumors about having found maps in Lee Swenson’s trash-basket, showing where the treasure was buried.”

“My God, Henry! That was a joke!”

“I know, so you told me--but it was a poor time for joking. The police are using everything they have. It seems there’s a woman in Milton who told Mike Stewart that Vanzetti made the bomb that blew up Judge Hayden’s house.”

“Henry, that is the talk of lunatics!”

“No, Mother, it’s the talk of the police, and the Governor regards himself as the head of the force, and he stands by it. They have told him that two of the crowd blew themselves up with a bomb they were making in Bellingham--the Galleani formulas didn’t work right.”

“You keep talking about bombs, Henry.”

“I’m telling you what was told me. Fuller says that both your boys were regular terrorists, and had a criminal record. He insists that Vanzetti was a convicted bandit before he came to trial at Dedham. He has got it into his head that Vanzetti was arrested, indicted, tried and convicted of the Bridgewater crime, and then arrested, indicted, tried and convicted of the South Braintree crime. It didn’t happen that way, did it?”

“Of course not, Henry! They arrested them for both crimes. They decided to convict Bart for Bridgewater, as a means of making things look blacker for Nick.”

“Well, that’s what I thought, and I tried to get it across to Fuller, but he didn’t take kindly to it. He doesn’t like to have his mind changed.”

“Henry, you appall me! You mean he is actually as ignorant of the case as that?”

“I don’t know so much about the case myself, Mother, but I was able to note half a dozen mistakes he made; and you’re going to have a hard time changing him, because stubbornness is his leading quality. He makes a virtue of it, because he can’t think, and knows it, and resents having to try. That’s what you’re up against, and you might as well know it at the outset--no use fooling yourself. Go and see him, and make sure, if you want to.”

“Will he see me?”

“He says he’ll see everybody--that’s going to be his grandstand play. You understand, he’s a politician, and has to play the game. He will pretend to be open-minded--but I’m telling you what’s in the back of his head, and what will be his final decision.”

Cornelia discussed the soul of this Governor, and a possible way to move it. No use in public propaganda, mass-meetings and petitions; he regarded them with contempt. Could he be reached by social pressure, the snobbery of the automobile dealer, who sold high-priced cars to high-priced customers? Henry answered that Fuller himself didn’t appear to care for the social game; but doubtless his family would be glad to be received. The only sign of an interest in culture on Fuller’s part was that he went abroad and purchased paintings. He didn’t really know about painting, and would not have dared to buy the work of Americans, for fear of playing the fool. But “old masters” were standard, as safe as corner real estate on Tremont Street; so he would pay a quarter of a million dollars for a Van Dyke, and put it in his drawing-room, and that would make a great stir in the papers. But it hadn’t had any effect socially, as Cornelia knew; to the inner circle of Boston exclusiveness, Fuller was His Excellency during office hours, but at tea-time and in the evening he was a dealer in motorcars.

“Too bad that Alice is so spiritualized,” said Henry. “She might give them a dinner.” Alice, he added, was now receiving the ministrations of a Yogi “master,” being subjected to the most esoteric rite of healing, which consisted of blowing into her ear.

Cornelia got out her address-book, which had secret marks, indicating degrees of responsiveness to subversive propaganda. She and her son-in-law compiled a list, and laid out a program upon which blue-bloods should be asked to concentrate--to persuade the Governor to appoint some sort of commission to investigate the case, and give it an informal new trial. If, as Henry believed, the supersalesman himself was hopeless, the strategy was to get him committed to an arrangement whereby the final decision would rest with more open-minded persons.

The little old lady had an inspiration: instead of appealing directly to the Governor, they would concentrate their energies upon Bishop Lawrence of the Episcopal Church, blood-brother to all blue-bloods, and official delegate of the Prince of Peace on earth. Persuade the Bishop to appeal to the Governor for an impartial commission! To make a thorough job of it, why not determine the commission in advance, and make certain of getting competent and high-minded persons? Why not? agreed Henry; so they proceeded to discuss names. Cornelia worked herself up to a pitch of excitement. “Couldn’t we ask him to appoint Mr. Lowell?” She meant President Lowell of Harvard University. The blue-blood ladies, while paying full homage to this great personality, do not grant him his title, as in the case of the Bishop; by this means they indicate the fact that the intellectual life, while important, is a merely human affair, while the spiritual life is from God.

“He wouldn’t take the responsibility,” said Henry, “but of course it would settle the matter if he did. Fuller wouldn’t dare go against Lowell and the Bishop.”

So it came about that at the office of Mr. John F. Moors, of the firm of Moors and Cabot, investment bankers, there assembled one afternoon a group of socially and intellectually significant persons: half a dozen Harvard professors, and the wives of several others; Episcopal clergymen of Boston and Concord; and such persons as Mrs. Thornwell, Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Winslow, with Mary Donovan and Gardner Jackson to represent the committee. They met for the purpose of working out a method of approaching the Bishop of the Blue-bloods, and asking him to bring it about that the University-president of the Blue-bloods should be invited to conduct a blue-blood trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, and thus save the good name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts before the civilized world.

A curious gathering: soft-voiced, gentle, noble-minded, but not entirely efficient persons, meeting in dead secrecy, with their fingers upon their lips, in this melodramatic neighborhood of State Street; a group of kindly conspirators, babes in the woods surrounded by ravenous wolves--in the form of newspaper reporters who would gobble up their respectability with half a dozen snaps of their slavering jaws. So careful they must be, to make exactly the right approach to the ineffable Bishop; putting on felt-slippers and walking on tiptoes! Not saying anything extreme to him! Not declaring that the men were innocent, but merely that they had not been proved guilty to impartial minds! Sparks began to fly from the eyes of Mary Donovan, Irish ex-Catholic Joan of Arc of the labor movement. A curious contrast between self-contained and decorous ladies of the Back Bay, and this fiery Celtic girl, plain of garb, severe of countenance, making no secret of her bitter scorn for liberals and their ritual.

Silence! Secrecy! Hush, not a word! Even the widow of Governor Thornwell had lost caste, because she had had her name in the newspapers! No one who had been in the newspapers must approach the Bishop, nor even be named to the Bishop--for fear the timid episcopal soul might seek refuge in the recesses of the episcopal hole and refuse to emerge. The members of the Sacco-Vanzetti committee were “untouchables,” and merely to have it known that they desired a certain procedure would be sufficient to render it episcopally impossible. All were warned to silence, the meeting dispersed--and in an hour or two the newspapermen had the whole story on the front page, each after its own fashion. The Hearst man explained the social stratifications, referring to the Sacco-Vanzetti committee as the “low minds,” the Moors group as the “middle minds,” and the Bishop Lawrence group as the “high minds”!

Mr. Thompson had presented an appeal for clemency from Vanzetti, and an explanation that Sacco refused to make any appeal, but ought to have it granted just the same. It was, perhaps, the most singular document ever submitted to an automobile salesman in the history of the industry. Bartolomeo Vanzetti had insisted upon writing it himself, with only verbal revision by his lawyer. He took it as an occasion to explain his doctrines and beliefs to the world:

“Our ideas are not new. In one form or another they have influenced human thought in the western world, and therefore history, for at least two thousand years. Among their modern champions are men such as William Godwin, Shelley, Carlo Pisacane, Proudhon, Reclus, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Tolstoi (in a sense), Flammarion, Malatesta, Galleani, and in your country Tucker, and other great intellects and hearts. The great philosopher Ernest Renan said that Christ was a ‘political anarchist.’”

And this to a pious Baptist, who told the newspaper reporters that his real preference in life would be to run a Baptist Sunday-school! A Mason, an Elk, an Odd Fellow and a Knight of Pythias--his idea of literature the Saturday Evening Post! Said Vanzetti:

“Our counsel has warned us that what we have to say may deepen the prejudice against us; but we are foremostly concerned to save what no human power except ourselves can deprive us of, our faith and our dignity, since we have already been deprived of almost all of what men can deprive men.”

The Governor announced that he would consider evidence from both sides; and so it was a question of repeating all over again the Dedham, and later the Plymouth trial. But under what singular circumstances! Mr. Thompson, the lawyer for the petitioners, was not allowed to make any opening statement, to say what he expected to prove; he was allowed to bring his own witnesses, but not to hear the witnesses of the other side, nor even to know who they were. Sacco and Vanzetti lay in their cells, and men came to the Governor’s private office and whispered rumors about them, and their attorney learned about it from gossip in the newspapers! Betty Alvin came home from her brief session in the executive chambers and revised the “Alice in Wonderland” verses to fit this new situation:

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

Quite literally, this supersalesman of automobiles was judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney; and so ignorant of psychology that he really thought he could fill all three rôles; so ignorant of law that he really thought it was a trial he was conducting, and would be accepted as such by the world. Or rather, if you could believe the sarcastic young lady Bolshevik, he thought that he was so rich and great that he didn’t give a damn what the world thought. In that point of view he had the support of the whole prosperous mob, which gloried in defying the opinion of mankind.

The State House swarmed with reporters. Every Boston paper had several men on the story, and the press associations and New York papers had their own representatives. But those who saw the Governor were cautioned not to talk, and all but the friends of the defense obeyed. The only news was what the Governor’s office gave out every day, and mostly it was disguised propaganda. The private secretary had not been quite accurate when he said that they “immediately” chucked the mail into the fire. They first went over it, and extracted letters which were violent in demanding death for the two wops, and these were mimeographed and handed to the newspapermen. So the world read the weighty sentiments of Mrs. J. E. Damon of Brockton, who attached a small American flag to her letter, to make sure it would not be overlooked:

“I feel very sure that you will stand firm for ‘law and order.’ ... Foreign people will not respect our Government unless we uphold our Judges and Supreme Court. What is this country coming to if radical elements are allowed to do as they see fit?”

Also the sentiments of a representative of Comrade Jesus, the “political anarchist”: the Reverend Floyd W. Johnson of the First Presbyterian Church of Central City, Nebraska, who appealed to the Governor of Massachusetts to “let these propagandists of un-American policies know that there is not enough money in Russia to buy even one district court in America.” A curious item for members of the defense committee, who at that late hour were being visited by the relative of an important judicial personage, and informed that it would still be possible to work out an “arrangement”! By the payment of only fifty thousand dollars--from Russia or any other place--everything could be settled amicably. Vanzetti--since he was admitted to be innocent--would be pardoned; while Sacco--who might possibly be guilty--would be judged insane, and held until the excitement had died down!

It was a war going on for the possession of public opinion; a day and night campaign, with forays and sallies, rumors and alarms, plots and counter-plots. The big guns thundered from the rear, and independent sharp-shooters crept forth to do sniping. “Hundred percent American” and “Pro Bono Publico” wrote letters to the Transcript, and the defense committee changed its “Bulletin” from a monthly to a fortnightly, and filled many columns with letters from friends of social justice all over the world.

Prof. Felix Frankfurter, one of the liberals of the Harvard Law School, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, the Back Bay’s palladium of culture, reviewing the case and exposing the manifold errors of Judge Thayer. To Boston conservatism that was a frightful scandal, and something had to be done at once. A champion was found, a tremendous personage by the name of Wigmore, with so many titles and honors that it took two and seven-eighths inches in “Who’s Who” to recite them: a graduate of Harvard and of the Harvard Law School, Past President of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Past President of the American Association of University Professors, Commanding Member of the Staff of the Judge Advocate-General of the United States Army with the rank of Major, Member of the United States Section of the Inter-American High Commission, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France, Member of the League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Coöperation, and Dean of the Law School of Northwestern University--a Methodist institution lifted to worldly magnificence by Judge Gary of the Steel Trust.

This two hundred and forty centimeter gun went into action from its emplacement a thousand miles away. Dean Wigmore wrote a broadside, starting with two columns on the front page of the Transcript, and expanding into seven half-columns on the next page. He gave Felix Frankfurter one of those wiggings which professors exist to receive and deans exist to administer. With annihilating wit he referred to him, all through the two columns and the seven half-columns, as “the plausible pundit”; he accused him of having made “errors and misstatements which if discovered in a brief of counsel submitted in a case would qualify him for proceedings for disbarment.”

Alas for poor Dean Bigwig! He had got his citations from Thayer, or from some friend of Thayer’s; and never could it have entered his bewigged head that a judge of the Superior Court of the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts would practice the device of falsifying a legal record, quoting statements incorrectly, and even making up passages which he said were in the record, but which were not in the record! If such procedures “would qualify a lawyer for proceedings for disbarment,” what would they do to a judge of the Superior Court? Apparently they would qualify him for the enthusiastic support of all the courts and most of the newspapers of his Commonwealth, as well as of the Dean of the Law School of the University of Judge Gary. They would qualify him a few months later to have the banqueting alumni of Dartmouth College stand up and cheer themselves hoarse for a five full minutes by the watches of newspaper reporters.

Defending himself in his last decision, Judge Thayer had boasted that the Supreme Judicial Court had “approved” the verdict of the Dedham jury. Felix Frankfurter had pointed out that this was not true. All that the higher court could do was to “affirm” the verdict, which in the technical language of lawyers is an entirely different matter. The dean now elaborately denied that Thayer had used the word “approved,” and he accused Frankfurter of libeling Thayer. “It is a libel on the worthy trial judge, in that it charges him with knowing falsity in an official statement.”

Touching indeed the faith of poor Dean Wigmore in his “worthy trial judge” a thousand miles away! Had this “worthy trial judge” failed to furnish him with the full text of the decision? Or had the dean been in such a hurry to burst into the Transcript that he hadn’t stopped to examine the document for himself? All that Felix Frankfurter had to do in his reply was to refer the worthy dean to the sentence in Judge Thayer’s opinion, as printed in the Amended Bill of Exceptions over Judge Thayer’s signature, attested by the Clerk for the Superior Court of Norfolk County, pages 366 and 367, where the word “approved” was plainly to be read. So there was Dean Wigless, in the distressing position of having furnished the rope to hang his friend, Judge Thayer, for “knowing falsity in an official statement”!

And then the questions and answers about Sacco’s dialogue with Katzmann, which Judge Thayer had invented and inserted into his decision! The dean had accepted this bogus passage, and put it into his letter to the Transcript, and the Transcript had solemnly published it. Now, said Frankfurter, “a careful search of the record of Sacco’s cross-examination discloses no such questions and answers as Dean Wigmore quotes. Will he not be good enough to give me a reference to the page of the record?” Needless to say, Dean Baldhead would not be that good! He would fail to mention the matter again; and the Back Bay’s hatred of Felix Frankfurter, Viennese Jew, became so intense that they started a tale of his having been hired by the defense to write the Atlantic Monthly article; they raised his price several thousand dollars a day, until they had got it up to the colossal sum of one hundred and forty thousand dollars! Such was opinion in that part of Boston which Vanzetti described as “the golden rabble.”

VII

Rumors! Rumors! The State House was converted from a bootleggers’ joint to a poison gas factory. Every day new witnesses went to see the Governor, and there was a new crop of stories as to what they had told him, and what he had asked them. The Governor wants to know why Vanzetti didn’t take the stand at the Plymouth trial! The Governor has heard that Mrs. Brini got all the Plymouth witnesses together in her home and told them what to say! The Governor has learned that the Springfield Republican got twenty thousand dollars from the defense committee for its editorial on the case! And all these rumors were not rumors, they were for practical purposes the truth; the Governor heard them, and the Governor believed them. Surrounded as he was by men who took bribes, how could he conceive that anybody would work for nothing? Some one was causing state detectives to follow the witnesses for the defense, and these detectives would come back with notebooks full of formulas for the poison-gas factory under the golden dome.

Sometime previously the defense had got hold of the reports of the Pinkerton detectives on the South Braintree crime. An amazing revelation to Cornelia and Betty and Joe: those voices which had been shouting to them in the days before the trial, when they had been seeking witnesses, and failing to find them! The ghosts which had shrieked in Dedham courtroom, unheard by mortal ear! The secrets which had been in the head of Henry Hellyer on the witness-stand--the very notes he had held in his hand! Now Cornelia and Betty and Joe might go with this “Operative H.H.,” immediately after the South Braintree crime, to interview Mary Splaine, the star identification witness; that marvelous-eyed young woman who had looked out of a factory window in the midst of shooting, and at a distance of eighty feet, in a period of one or two seconds, had noted the minutest physical details of Sacco, including a “good-sized left hand,” which he assuredly never had, and “complexion of a peculiar greenish-white,” which he had after being kept in Dedham jail for a year, but never while he was growing tomatoes in Mr. Kelley’s garden!

Here in these reports you saw Mary Splaine in the company of Henry Hellyer, Mike Stewart and Captain Proctor, inspecting the photographs of criminals, and making a positive identification of Antonio Parmisano, or “Tony the Wop,” as the bandit who had played the part which was later attributed to Sacco. Captain Proctor set out to get “Tony the Wop,” and discovered that he had been in jail on the day of the crime--the one really safe place for wops in Massachusetts! And meantime Mary had told to “H.H.” a detailed and circumstantial tale about two men in the shoe-factory who had plotted and committed the crime; she gave the names of the men, and recited a story which covered the affairs of the shoe-factory for some eighteen years. Six days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, the detective was entering his report as follows:

“As opportunities occurred I made discreet inquiries about Mr. X, who Miss Splaine accused of having been implicated in the murder and robbery. My inquiries show that there is absolutely no ground for Miss Splaine’s accusation and that Mr. X enjoys Mr. Slater’s confidence.” (Mr. Slater was the owner.) “To-day I took the matter up with Mr. Frayer” (the superintendent). “He ridiculed the idea of Mr. X being implicated and further states that no serious attention must be attached to Mary Splaine’s stories, because she is one of the most irresponsible persons he ever came in contact with.”

And then, a little glimpse into the soul of an “operative,” representing a great national detective agency and looking for bandits. He knows that the police have got Sacco and Vanzetti and are planning to put the crime onto them; and he reports how he questioned a laborer who was digging a trench, close to the scene of the crime. He reports this laborer as having had a very good chance to get a good look, and adds, “Some one who can speak Italian ought to interview this man, as if he went on the stand to-day he would say that Sacco and Vanzetti were not the men.”

VIII

Witness after witness went to interview Governor Fuller and returned to defense headquarters, reporting that the supersalesman had got his mind centered on the Bridgewater crime. So Mr. Thompson did some inquiring and pulled some wires, and managed to get from the lawyer of the shoe company the reports on that earlier crime, made by the same “Operative H.H.,” and another man, “J.J.H.” Here again the evidence wiped out practically everything the government had proved. On the day of the crime all four of the leading witnesses had described both the car and the bandits differently from the way they later described them at the trial.

These Bridgewater reports seemed of especial importance, because they destroyed the witness “Skip” Harding, who saw the Bridgewater crime, and at the trial identified Vanzetti as the shotgun bandit. Here in the Pinkerton reports was “Skip,” talking with the police a few hours after the crime, and that certainty which he had displayed upon the witness-stand was wholly lacking. “I did not get much of a look at his face, but think he was a Pole,” he said; and eight or nine days later he again referred to the faces of the bandits, saying that he “did not see them on the day of the hold-up.” The car he described as a “black Hudson six,” and gave the registration number; as an automobile mechanic, he knew cars. The police decided to prove that it was a Buick. When Harding testified at the trial, he testified that it was a Buick.

Every one of the other principal witnesses was discredited in the same way. The witness Bowles, for example, had described the shotgun bandit as having “red cheeks,” “slim face,” and “a closely cropped mustache,” which surely did not fit Vanzetti. So the defense lawyers felt that they had won their case, and Mr. Thompson prepared an elaborate letter to the Governor, thirty-three typewritten pages. The reports and the letter were taken to the State House and delivered to the Governor’s secretary, and everybody waited, on tiptoe with excitement, for some word of the result. A week or two later one of the friends of the defense, arguing with the Governor, happened to remark, “That is disproved in the Pinkerton reports.” Said the Governor, “Pinkerton reports? What are they?” “Those reports which were turned over to you,” replied the amazed visitor. “I haven’t seen any such thing,” declared the Governor, and turned to his secretary. “What’s this about Pinkerton reports?” “Oh,” said the secretary indifferently, “something about a cropped mustache!”

Beltrando Brini was in his nineteenth year, a slender, dark-eyed youth, preparing to enter college, and earning his living by teaching the violin to Italian children in Plymouth. He still went now and then to play for Bart in prison; also he was in demand to play at meetings for the defense. He could play fine music, but the number most effective was “Old Black Joe,” because it was the tune which Bart had helped to teach him as a little boy. Trando would tell the story of that ill-fated day-before-Christmas morning, when he had helped to peddle the eels in North Plymouth; he would tell what Vanzetti’s teachings and example had meant to him, all through his early life; after which he would play Bart’s favorite song, “When you and I were young, Maggie,” and tears would run down the faces of women in the audience.

Now Trando went to see the supersalesman of automobiles, and told the story to him; but no tears appeared upon those ruddy, rounded cheeks. It seemed that the great man had worked out a new theory for himself; he pictured Bartolomeo Vanzetti attempting the Bridgewater crime at a quarter to eight that winter morning, and then driving twenty miles or more to North Plymouth, and starting in to sell eels with Trando for an alibi. In vain did Trando insist that he and his father and his mother and Bart’s landlady and many other persons had seen Bart from the moment he woke, at six o’clock that morning, long before daylight; in vain did Trando tell about Bart sending him to hunt for his rubbers. Apparently the Governor thought that Bart had gone to Bridgewater and attempted the hold-up while Trando was rummaging in the attic for his rubbers!

And then Mrs. Brini, the gentle and kindly, who shed tears every time she thought of her former boarder, and insisted, over and over: “He is good man! He is good man!” The Governor confronted her with the proposition that she had gathered all the witnesses at her home and taught them what to say. In vain she explained the origin of that tale--that the lawyer had been too lazy to go and interview the witnesses, but had told her to have them come to her home, and he would meet them there to consult about the case.

And then Joseph Rosen, the Jewish peddler of cloth. The defense had to advertise for him in the Jewish Daily Forward. One day came a telegram from Buffalo, he had heard about the case and would come. Having learned more English in the course of the last six years, Rosen could take care of himself. When he was ushered into the executive chambers and the Governor started to question him about where he had been six weeks ago, and could he remember what he had done on March seventeenth last, “What’s this?” said Rosen. “More of that Katzmann stuff?” He had not forgiven the district attorney for trying to make a fool of him before the jury.

And then one of the editors of the Boston Transcript. The age of miracles had come; an editor of the sacred Transcript had been persuaded to investigate the case, and had become convinced that the men were innocent! He was so conscientious about it, his employers were impressed, and generously let him do it on their time: they would pay for the getting of material, even though they would not publish it! Now this conservative and indubitably respectable gentleman proceeded to the Governor’s office, with a brief-case full of documents and charts. He went prepared to point out to the chief executive of his Commonwealth the flaws in the government’s case; and he had what he later described to his friends as the most preposterous hour of his life. For the Governor didn’t want to have any flaws pointed out to him, and when the editor insisted, his recourse was to interrupt with rude and brutal ejaculations, and to snort through his nose.

But the editor went on, insisting, because it was a matter of justice, and the New England conscience is that way. There was the matter of the discrepancy of the trains, upon which the editor had done enough research work and calculation to have earned him a degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Practically the only proof the government had against Vanzetti in the South Braintree crime was the identification of Levangie, gate-tender at the railroad crossing, plus the identification of another crossing-tender, who thought Vanzetti had pointed a gun at him and made him raise his gates, while the bandit-car was fleeing with the loot. This latter crossing was on the way to the Manley Woods, where, according to the “theory,” the bandits had “thrown away” the Buick car, not far from the Coacci house.

This made what the jury had accepted as a story; but now came the editor, showing that each of these two crossing-tenders had specified a certain train, and the time of these trains was a matter of record, and they didn’t fit. The Governor thought that possibly one train or the other had not been on time; but the editor answered that there were such things as “train-sheets.” He had the greatest difficulty in the world convincing his Governor that a railroad has records showing the hour at which every train passed every station, even as far as six years back. As a matter of fact, the sheets of those trains had been produced on the stand at the trial, and the district attorney might have found the truth if he had wanted it.

A singular interview! The Governor would profess complete mastery of matters concerning which it was evident that he knew very little, and when he was corrected, would fly into a rage and demand, “What right have you to question me?” The too-conscientious editor could not make his arguments clear, because the Governor did not know the elementary facts upon which the arguments rested; nor could he explain these elementary facts, because that would offend the great man’s dignity. He came out from the interview to report that the situation was hopeless from the point of view of the defense. He realized, of course, the political game that was going on: the “grand-stand play,” in current slang. The Governor would have the whole world marveling at his patience and open-mindedness, while in reality he was impatient of argument, and his mind was closed.

Bitter struggles in the rooms of the defense committee on Hanover street, where radicals and conservatives fought over the question of how to meet this desperate situation! Controversies lasting until the small hours of the morning, and then not settled! Feuds between respectable persons who wanted to follow the guidance of respectable lawyers, and young socialists and communists who wanted to make mass appeals, and have parades on the streets, and threats of a general strike! The young radicals organized a protest meeting in Symphony Hall, to tell Boston the facts which the Governor knew and was hiding; but then came Thompson and Frankfurter, and forced the calling off of that meeting, by threatening to withdraw from the case. Joe Randall and his wife would labor all night to prepare hair-raising stories for the newspapers; but when the reporters came to Thompson, he would wave them away with a phrase, “Nothing for the papers to-day.” It was easy to understand his point of view. There was no worse charge to be brought against a lawyer by respectable Boston than that he was “trying his case in the newspapers”; and Thompson clung to his belief that somehow it was going to be possible to persuade respectable Boston to grant justice to his clients.

A brilliant idea came to Betty--to collect the testimony of persons with whom Judge Thayer had discussed Sacco and Vanzetti during the past six years! To present respectable Boston with the profanity, vulgarity and hatred which old Judge Fury had poured out in the presence of everybody, from senators to club waiters! This idea was presented to the lawyers, and at first they were horrified; but as time passed, and the Governor’s bias became clear, they worked out a way to make it into a legal procedure. They would appeal to the Governor on the ground of Thayer’s prejudice; if that did not succeed, they would make a further move in the courts on that basis, with a possible appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States on a writ of certiorari.

So began a still hunt among those who knew but did not admire the “worthy trial judge.” There were many such persons in high station; but would they consent to violate the reticences which protect social life? Appeals to their consciences were made, and a few yielded: George U. Crocker, a former city treasurer, and member of the University Club, where Judge Thayer had lived during the Dedham trial; Mrs. Lois Rantoul, who was a Lowell; Robert Benchley, one of the editors of Life; Elizabeth Bernkopf, a newspaper correspondent; John Nicholas Beffel; and Prof. Richardson, of Dartmouth College, to whom the judge had said, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards yesterday?” What “Web” had really said was “arnychistic bastards,” but there was no use trying to get that across to the public; nobody would believe it, and anyhow, all persons who handled the story--reporters and compositors and copy-readers--would decide that it was an error, and do their duty. Prof. Richardson said he thought that “Web” had also said “sons-of-bitches”; but of course there was no way to get that printed in a moral community.

A picturesque little drama over the getting of the signature of Frank P. Sibley, star reporter of that premier family-paper, the Boston Globe! “Sib,” as he was known to his colleagues, was a much beloved and slightly picturesque figure, known to everybody on the streets of Boston--six feet tall and wearing a Windsor tie, as near to a “Bohemian” as could survive in that frigid atmosphere. He had been the correspondent of the Globe at the Dedham trial, and had heard many expressions of prejudice by Thayer. He had agreed to sign an affidavit, and it was got ready; but then he discovered that he couldn’t sign it, his managing editor wouldn’t let him! In fact, “Sib” had come to agree with his managing editor--it was necessary for a newspaper reporter to be impartial. Just like a judge!

A serious disappointment to the defense, for Sibley was an experienced man, who had been covering major court cases in New England for some twenty years; moreover, he didn’t have to rely upon his memory of Thayer’s conduct, he had written a letter about it to the attorney-general of the Commonwealth. There was a conference of Joe Randall and Gardner Jackson and others who knew the newspaper game, and there came a tip from one of the editors of the Globe as to how the issue might be forced. Let the Globe hear the threat of public exposure of the fact that it was refusing to let one of its reporters sign an affidavit in the interest of justice. Mild blackmail, in short!

William G. Thompson was consulted, and proposed to submit the Sibley affidavit to the Governor as his own affidavit, and have Sibley called before the Governor--which would, of course, open up the story. Armed with that dire threat, Gardner Jackson went to see the managing editor of the Globe, under whom he had worked for seven years, and they had their first quarrel in that long period. The managing editor said that they were playing an unfair trick upon his paper, that it was a dirty thing to do, and so on. He would not give any decision; but that same afternoon Frank Sibley came to Thompson’s office and affixed his signature!

XII

The supersalesman of automobiles had announced that he would not appoint any commission; the law did not permit him to delegate his authority, but required him to make the decision himself. But Cornelia and her blue-blood friends went on with their quiet intrigue, and one day there appeared in the papers a letter signed by the Bishop of the Blue-bloods and four of his flock, appealing to the Governor for an advisory commission. Just as Cornelia had foretold, it was impossible for a mere automobile dealer to withstand such pressure; he changed his mind. As a great man in public life, he of course did not announce that he had changed his mind; he merely announced that he was going to do what he had previously announced he was not going to do.

More intrigue, to induce him to name the right commission! Dignified established persons, wholly without taint of contact with anarchism, atheism or draft-dodging, called upon the Governor, or wrote letters, pointing out to him that there was one eminent citizen who would be trusted by all right-minded persons in New England to give a just and impartial opinion regarding the guilt of the two accused men--and that was “Mr. Lowell”! It was the “middle minds” who were inspiring this intrigue; Cornelia, partly of her own impulse, partly led by her friends, had come to center her hopes upon the august President of Harvard University. “Radical” friends, including her granddaughter and her grandson-in-law, laughed at her for believing that Mr. Lowell would prove himself more free from prejudice than any other millionaire. But they had nothing in particular against him, and nobody to prefer, among those whom the Governor would consider. “So let dear old Grannie go ahead,” said Betty; “it keeps her hoping.”

Grannie went ahead, and in due course an announcement came from the State House; the Governor had appointed a commission consisting of A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard University, Robert Grant, retired judge of the Probate Court, and Samuel W. Stratton, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A vast and unanimous sigh of relief went up from the Back Bay. At last the terrible problem would be settled, and settled right! It would be dealt with by gentlemen, instead of by vulgarians and political tricksters, corrupted officials and police agents! A new atmosphere would be brought into the case, and the world would see that Massachusetts brains and breeding still counted for righteousness and dignity! Two of the three members of the commission were registered blue-bloods; the third, though he came from the west, had been adopted and placed in charge of the great school which, next to Harvard, was Boston’s pride, the place where the technicians of her giant industries got their exact and efficient training.

XIII

Vanzetti was now in Dedham jail, and Cornelia made a trip to carry him the good news. Needless to say, he did not know the President of Harvard University, but if Nonna said that he was a good and great man, Bart was willing to believe it. But she must not forget that it was hard for a rich man to rise above the ideas of his class. Was Mr. Lowell a very rich man? When the prisoner learned that he owned huge cotton-mills, and enjoyed an income of close to a million dollars a year from the ill-paid labor of wage-slaves, the prisoner said, “He must be a very great man if he do joostice to anarchistas.”

Bart preferred to converse about Proudhon’s “Peace and War,” which he was translating. Here was his idea of a great man. They discussed the formula, “Property is theft”; and Bart showed a letter to the Vanguard Press, to which he was sending the manuscript of the translation. “By gosh, don’t loss it!” was his injunction.

Also he had been doing more work upon his novel, “Events and Victims.” It was in reality a very short novelette: the story of an immigrant worker in America; but alas, no magazine would publish such material! Bart thought that if some one would send a copy to Russia, it might be published there--or possibly made into a moving picture. In America, of course, they wanted moving pictures about the rich, or in praise of riches. Bart had put a passage about the “movies” into his novel, and he read it now to his friend.

A curious circumstance: in nine or ten weeks he was to die, in the midst of terrific public clamor; and the chiefs of the moving picture industry would hold a meeting and resolve that the name of Vanzetti was to be forever barred from the screen, and that all pictures which had been taken of the case should be immediately destroyed. They, the propaganda chiefs of capitalism, knew who their enemies were, and no mistake about it. Said Bartolomeo Vanzetti, speaking to the suppressors of his fame:

“I went out and walked towards the theater, hoping to see Johnny whom I knew to be passionately fond of moving picture shows. That night they were showing a screen version, a fragment of one of those romances which distort truth and realities; falsify history; provoke, cultivate and embellish all the morbid emotions, confusions, ignorances, prejudices and horrors; and, purposely and skillfully pervert the hearts and, still more, the minds. The characters of these morbid melodramas are always of two opposite types, one very good, the other very bad. The good ones are the good folks who are always good, always do good, are always right, and in the end always triumph. The others are always bad folk, who are always wrong, always do evil and finally pay the penalty. Just the reverse of life!

“Thus meditating, I reached the theater. Of course it was, as usual, crowded to the doors. The common people, being all heart, with little brain and less knowledge, are passionately interested in such senseless stories, and not a scene escapes them. They develop a wild and unreasoning affection for the unreal characters of the unreally good, whose hatreds and loves, risks and triumphs they share, and fervid hatred for and resentment against the unreal characters of the unreally bad gang. They lose their heads, weep, sigh, laugh, smile, fear, hope and throb, and, forgetting their cross of infamy, leave the theater more stupid than when they entered it.”

XIV

The Advisory Commission could not get to work until after the college commencements were over. But meantime the secret hearings before the Governor went on, and in the offices of the defense committee several typewriters clicked all day and most of the night, and sacks full of letters, leaflets, and pamphlets went out. The barriers set up by the capitalist press were broken down; even the great news agencies had to spread the world’s protest. The flood of letters rose higher in the Governor’s office, and while the secretary still boasted of the promptness with which he burned them, they did not fail to produce an effect--especially when reinforced by the explosion of bombs in front of United States embassies in Europe, and the crashing of window-glass in Argentina.

Cornelia wrote letters, and carried on long telephone conversations, and traveled about visiting businessmen and bankers in their offices, and wealthy ladies in their homes on Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue. For the most part they listened with the patience which her age and station demanded; they promised to study the case, and often did so. Now and then they told her that while they appreciated her sincerity, they knew that she was being imposed upon by scoundrels, and that it would be wiser if she did not force them to discuss the matter.

Cornelia knew what to expect; she had watched Boston for a couple of generations, and read of it still earlier. In any moral issue, officialdom had always been on the side of reaction, and the broadcloth mob had supported it--even to the extent of putting a rope about the waist of William Lloyd Garrison and dragging him through the streets. But always there had been a small minority of choice spirits who had come out in opposition, and made the glory of the city’s history. Among these had been the oldest names and the bluest blood; and so it was now. There appeared an open letter addressed to Governor Fuller, asking a list of pertinent questions, and the signers of that letter included the best that Massachusetts had to show in every form of culture. Nor did these people stop with writing letters; they wrote their names upon checks, and gave time and thought to the case--everything that civilized human beings could do to make headway against brutal power.

The Thornwell family offered a miniature of the whole Back Bay. Cornelia crusading, and her granddaughter Betty ready to turn into a militant, and get her head broken by the police; while on the other hand the aged Abner Thornwell, oldest member and nominal head of the family, was sitting paralyzed in his wheel-chair, boiling like a steel crucible about to explode. Great-uncle Abner--so he was always referred to, because of the children--resembled his sister-in-law Cornelia in one thing, that he could not think or talk about anything but Sacco and Vanzetti; his conversation, a monologue on account of his complete deafness, resembled a verse-form with a refrain--“Burn them! Burn them!”

Abner insisted upon writing bloodthirsty letters to the Governor and to the newspapers. This would have been a scandal, because everybody knew of Cornelia’s part in the case; and since she had taken it up first, family etiquette declared it to be hers. So the Scatterbridge family, with whom the old man resided, entered into an elaborate conspiracy to suppress his letters; secretaries, chauffeurs and attendants, butlers, footmen and maids--everybody had to be warned to bring the old gentleman’s letters to Mr. James instead of mailing them! In the end the victim found out about that, and worked himself into such a fury that the family was afraid he would die on the spot. He had to be allowed to mail a letter to the Governor, and to have an acknowledgment, as his rank and station required; James having sent his secretary to explain the circumstances and see that the letter was not given to the press.

Between these two extremes the other members of the family were distributed here and there. Henry Cabot Winters had become quite sympathetic toward his “Bolshevik mother-in-law”; he gave it as his legal opinion that she had come out of her seven years’ struggle with unexpected glory. Regardless of whether her wops were innocent or guilty--and Henry said he had no opinion--she had proved to all the world that they had not had a fair trial. Who could have foreseen that luck would oblige her with such incidents as the making of bogus citations by “Web” Thayer, and the annihilation of poor “Dean Wigless” in the columns of the Transcript? Manifestly, the judicial system of Massachusetts had slipped up. While the great lawyer would not do anything about it, nor even say anything about it, he would furnish his mother-in-law with first-class legal advice free of charge.

Also Quincy Thornwell had been impressed by the interest taken in the case by men of standing in the financial world, such as John F. Moors, who was a member of the “Fincom,” or Financial Commission--a device of the blue-blood bankers to watch the politicians, and keep them from stealing too large a percentage of the public funds. When Mr. Moors publicly said there was something wrong, Quincy stopped arguing with his aunt, and took to toddling round on his withered legs, a faithful messenger-boy, bringing gossip from the dinner-tables of the rich.

Mrs. Jack Gardner had left Fenway Court for palaces and mansions above; but other hostesses had taken her place, and Quincy would bring home the funny stories which smart society liked to tell about the super salesman of automobiles, and his old paintings and other efforts at culture. He had proposed to appoint Harry Garfield, president of Williams College, to the Lowell commission, but Mrs. So-and-so had insisted that it wouldn’t do, because Harry’s grandfather had been assassinated by an anarchist. It had really been his father, said Quincy; but the State House wasn’t very strong on history. Cornelia added that the assassin had not been an anarchist, but a plain lunatic, which was different, whether the Governor would admit it or not.

“As a matter of fact,” said Quincy, “on that basis the Governor would himself be barred from deciding, because somebody murdered his grandfather.”

Cornelia took that bit of history home with her, and mentioned it to the sarcastic Betty, who retorted: “Somebody murdered him too late!” Cornelia shuddered, and said “Hush!”--looking about for a spy. The thing of which she lived in hourly terror was that some lunatic might kill somebody connected with the government--in which case it would be all over with Sacco and Vanzetti, and perhaps with the defense committee as well!

Another person who had been startled by developments in the case was Betty’s mother. Impossible that Deborah should not be shaken by the letter from Bishop Lawrence, whose prize parishioner she was--he came to a state dinner at her home once every year. Yes, Deborah said, her mother had had ground for the protest; but now her troubles were all over, Mr. Lowell had the matter in charge, and would see that it was straightened out.

There was quite a tug of war in the Alvin family, for Rupert said thumbs down on all anarchists. But of course he wouldn’t dare to say so publicly, in defiance of his mother-in-law and his wife. What the great banker did was to keep out of the uproar, by pleading temporary retirement on account of ill-health. His doctors had insisted that he should find a “hobby,” something else to be interested in but other people’s money. So he was taking up church architecture, designing with his own hands a miniature English abbey, and having it built as a private chapel on his North Shore estate. It was costing a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but was really an economy, so the great banker explained; it would be a church for his friends and servants on the estate, thus saving gasoline and tires, and later on it would be a mausoleum.

XVI

And then the Scatterbridge family. Clara had raised her brood, who were in schools and colleges, and asking questions; therefore the mother was trying to understand public affairs, but finding them extremely complicated. She accepted the pamphlets her mother gave her, but the trouble was, she fell asleep so easily. As that was bad for her “reducing,” she found it better to go to bridge parties. When Cornelia told her a sad story about the wife of a shoe-worker, whose marriage had been a sort of death in life for seven years, Clara would be deeply touched, and would write a check to help feed and clothe the Sacco children. Then, in course of their talk, Cornelia would learn that Clara had just given a check to a patriotic lady who had called on her, representing a society which was seeking to compel all foreigners to be good, by having them registered and finger-printed by the police. This society was sending out literature demanding death for Sacco and Vanzetti; so Clara’s money was at work on both sides!

But no such conflict in the case of Clara’s husband. James Scatterbridge was one of the stern ones, upon whom Cornelia could make no impression whatever. The sarcastic Betty explained it by what she called “economic interpretation.” A great lawyer like Uncle Henry had to keep his mind open, because he could never tell which side might hire him; a banker like Father didn’t have to worry, because no matter whose money was stolen, it always came back to the bank; but an industrialist like Uncle James was a slave-driver with a whip, and if he didn’t hold it tight there would be no money for anybody.

James Scatterbridge would keep Abner’s stuff out of the papers, because family dignity required it; but he would go about among the lords of cottons and woolens and shoes and hardware and transportation, and voice his conviction that this was the great test of our institutions, and if we didn’t teach a lesson to the forces of disorder, the government might as well abdicate once for all. James had a voice that was like his annual product of a hundred million yards of cotton sheeting being ripped all at once by a giant hand; and just now was a great moment in his life, because he had been invited to address some important gathering of his fellows. He had set his best advertising man to writing a speech for him to learn, and Cornelia heard him rehearsing it in the library, in the presence of his adoring wife and several indigent female relatives: denouncing the rumors that the cotton industry was going to be lost to New England, and likewise the rumors that the “_boot_nshoe” industry was going to be lost.

James pronounced this latter as one word, with the accent on the first syllable; and he said it several times--“I say that the _boot_nshoe industry shall not leave New England!” It was a kind of incantation, which became effective when you said it loud enough and often enough. Quincy Thornwell explained to Cornelia that the old families who owned the cotton mills and shoe factories insisted on having all the money in dividends, and left nothing to keep the plants up. James hadn’t put a new machine into his mills in thirty years--so of course he was being undermined by Jews who got capital in New York and cheap labor in the Carolinas, and had no fear of blue-blood bankers conspiring to put them out of business because they were not graduates of Harvard and members of the Union Club!

XVII

Nemesis was waiting for James Scatterbridge, with such a tragedy as she prepares for powerful, aggressive, absolutely certain men. His sons were growing up; the oldest, James junior, was a member of the Harvard class of ’27, and Cornelia failed to attend the graduation, because of the anguish and suspense of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The second son, Josiah Thornwell Scatterbridge, was a sophomore at Harvard, and called on the phone, saying that he wanted to see his grandmother; so Cornelia invited him to lunch.

She hardly knew these children of Clara and James; to her they were still the nursery mob that scratched rare old furniture and smeared chocolate caramels on brocaded upholstery. They were growing up into individuals, but she had not had time for them. Now came “James’s Josiah”--such was his awkward designation--a shy, yellow-haired youth with staring blue eyes--and revealed the amazing thing that had happened. “Grandmother, I went to a meeting of the Liberal Club in college, and heard a man tell something about your case. It sounds to me pretty rotten, and I don’t think the family ought to leave you to do all the work. I thought I’d ask you to give me something to read, so that I can answer what people say.”

So there was punishment for a powerful, aggressive, absolutely certain manufacturer of one hundred million yards of cotton sheeting per annum! He had a son who was sensitive and open-minded, and was going to disgrace him before the world! “James’s Josiah” took the handful of pamphlets from his grandmother, and he did not fall asleep over them, but read them in a day, and told his brothers and sisters what was in them, and there were family rows, and word came to the father, who summoned the renegade to his office.

There was a stormy scene, in the course of which the son was absolutely forbidden to believe certain things which he could not help believing. He explained how he could not help it--thus administering to his father a subtle form of annoyance, which no enemy could have made worse. There was a “bust-up” between father and son; and when Clara heard about it, there was a near “bust-up” between husband and wife. For Clara took the boy’s side; he had a right to think for himself, and should most certainly not be put to work in the mills by way of punishment. Maybe Clara’s mother was right; there was a lot of rottenness in politics, and it was time that women began to make their votes count. So there was the Scatterbridge family, in the same turmoil over the Sacco-Vanzetti case as all the rest of Massachusetts!

XVI. THE LAW’S DELAY…

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