XIX. ACADEMIC AUTOCRACY

While presidents of great colleges delivered baccalaureate sermons and partook of graduation banquets, the two wops waited in jail, with the grim sentence hanging over their heads--to “suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning Sunday, the tenth of July, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-seven.” A singular perversity in the Governor of a great Commonwealth, a reluctance to grant even the smallest concession to hated defenders of hated wops: he would not say whether that sentence was to be postponed, but would leave the whole world to speculate for a month, and to imagine the execution. Said the defense committee in its June bulletin: “Torture of the body practiced in the Middle Ages is nothing compared with the torture of the mind and heart upon these two innocent men and their families and friends.”

The law specified that ten days prior to the date of execution condemned men should be moved to the death cells in Charlestown prison. Since there had been no reprieve, this law applied to Sacco and Vanzetti. The authorities of Norfolk County were anxious to get rid of them, on account of the expense; and so upon the first minute of the first day of July, the sheriff and his deputies entered the cells of the two men in Dedham jail, and ordered them to dress. No reasons given, no time allowed to pack their books and papers; they were shackled, and taken out into the darkness to a waiting automobile. With a dozen armed men riding behind and before, they were taken to Boston, through the sleeping city, and lodged in the “death cells.”

No one told them what this procedure meant, and they took it to mean immediate execution. Vanzetti’s first action upon his arrival was to start writing a farewell letter to the comrades. From now on they would live in solitude, close to the electric chair. Their friends cried out in horror--foolish sentimentalists, who had not yet brought themselves to face the thought of that electric chair! But the ruling class of Massachusetts knew what it meant to do, and went ahead. Not until after the move to the death cells did the Governor condescend to postpone the date of execution for a month.

The Lowell Commission held its first session on the last day of June. They met in the Governor’s Council chamber in the State House; a large room, done in white, high-studded, Doric style, with rich mahogany furniture, and soft velvet carpets. The desks are arranged in a circle, one continuous desk, with swivel chairs; overhead, a heavy chandelier, in which the history of New England’s technical progress had been recorded: first whale oil, then coal oil, then kerosene, then gas, and now electricity.

The first meeting of the Commission was “to determine procedure,” the papers said. The first procedure determined was secrecy, and it was very determined; not merely were spectators and newspaper reporters to be excluded, but witnesses and lawyers had to agree not to discuss on the outside what they said on the inside. A bitter disappointment for the defense committee, whose one hope was the education of public opinion. “It is very bad,” said Vanzetti. “It means they kill us.”

On the fifth of July the Commission began to hear witnesses, and the friends of the defense received more shocks. The Constitution of the United States provides that every man accused of crime shall “be confronted with the witnesses against him.” But these important gentlemen were going to examine witnesses, while Sacco and Vanzetti stayed in Charlestown prison, ignorant of what was going on. Furthermore, the Commission reserved the right to exclude defense counsel from the room whenever they saw fit, and to limit cross-examination as they saw fit. When the rules of legal procedure suited the convenience of the three important gentlemen, they would apply, and when the rules were inconvenient, they would be set aside.

Joe Randall, reporting developments for labor papers in New York, was one of the crowd which haunted the State House corridors and besieged the doors of the executive chambers. So he heard gossip not meant for “radical” ears; and after the third day he came to the apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill, and sat down by Cornelia and took her hand and said, “Grannie, I’m sorry--you’ve got to brace yourself for another blow.”

Cornelia winced; her lips trembled, in spite of her best efforts. Poor old lady, she had had more than her share of blows. The young reporter’s heart ached for the pitiful shrunken figure in the big Morris chair. “What is it, Joe?”

“Your dolly is stuffed with sawdust, Grannie.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, your great Mr. Lowell is just another ‘Web’ Thayer.”

“Oh, no!”

“Take my word for it, and get ready for the worst. The newspaper fellows fool the public, because that is what they are paid for, but they don’t as a rule let themselves be fooled. This Commission consists of Thayer, Katzmann, and Fuller all over again--with a little touch of Rugg and Wait and the rest of the supreme court judges, for dignity. They know that the men are guilty, and their purpose is to find evidence to justify the verdict. Mark my words, Grannie, before they get through they’ll do everything that Thayer has done, even to misquoting testimony and falsifying the record. Only one difference--Mr. Lowell will see to it that they have better manners.”

“You are too optimistic,” said the sarcastic Betty.

If it took Cornelia two weeks to realize that these predictions were right, it was only because she could not bring herself to admit the plain meaning of events. Witnesses emerged from that “star chamber,” and kept their promise not to talk to reporters; but they talked to their friends, including the defense committee. So came pictures of three elderly gray-heads, impatient, bored and irritated--partly on account of the weather, for it was stifling summer heat, but more especially by witnesses trying to get them to believe what they considered a wicked tangle of perjuries and deceptions.

Fuller was a politician, and used to making pretenses; but none of the three commissioners had ever been anything but an autocrat, and it was impossible for them to conceal their annoyance at the efforts of men and women to persuade them that notorious dynamiters and bandits were anything else. Lowell had already made the pronouncement that Sacco and Vanzetti were not really anarchists--that was just a camouflage their friends had invented for them! And what Lowell said became the truth, for his two colleagues regarded him as on the whole the greatest man in Massachusetts, and therefore in the world.

Betty turned out to be right on the subject of his manners. He could be courtesy incarnate when he wished to; but this was not one of the times. He interrupted the defense lawyers, and badgered them like schoolboys. The fact that William G. Thompson had been a trial lawyer for thirty-six years did not save him; nor the fact that he had been a federal prosecutor, nor the fact that he had been a Harvard lecturer. Said Lowell, “I don’t know whether you are trying to reach the truth or not. I assume, of course, that you are.” Said Thompson: “I am not going to put any question to this witness or to any other witness in the case unless it is assumed by the Commission that I am here not to deceive the Commission. There has been a good deal of imputation and it is very painful to me.”

A. Lawrence Lowell was an international and constitutional lawyer, but so far as concerned criminal trials he was a complete novice; yet he would show William G. Thompson how to handle witnesses, and did so. He took charge of the procedure, as he had done with everything all his life. He had a tremendous notion of his own powers, and was not there to have anybody tell him anything. His purpose was to protect the institutions of New England, now under attack by vicious radicals. The impulse to support those in authority was as automatic in this university president, as ever it had been in any of his stern forbears who had carried a hickory staff at divine worship, and cracked the knuckles of the inattentive and the polls of the somnolent. (Judge Grant often nodded at these hearings, but that may have been a device, of course.)

When “Web” Thayer made his appearance at the doors of the executive chambers, to render an accounting of his stewardship, every other person was immediately ushered out, and no one but his three fellow club-members asked him any questions, or heard his answers. Did he say why he had misquoted the Sacco-Vanzetti record in his decisions, or how he had come to invent and to cite bogus testimony? Did he admit that he had referred to his victims as “anarchistic bastards”? Did he admit that he had called them “sons-of-bitches”? The record of the hearings was silent on the subject.

When Fred G. Katzmann appeared, and Thompson tried to cross-question him, and pin him down as to some of his actions which the defense lawyer thought were not quite up to standard, even for district attorneys--then it was the business of the Commission to protect this former official. They had promised him that he would only be detained one hour, and he was impatient to get away. Exactly like Rupert Alvin, he suffered from failures of memory whenever he was in a tight corner. The defense lawyers tried to get something definite on the business of Mike Boda. The police had had Boda on April 20th, only sixteen days before they had arrested Sacco and Vanzetti; yet they made a mystery out of Boda. Was it not true that he was a very small man? And did any witness at the trial describe a small bandit? Katzmann would not be trapped. “Are you asking to test my memory? Look at the record.” It so happened that at this very hour, in a room immediately adjoining, the Governor was demanding of one of his visitors: “If Vanzetti was a good man, why did he associate with Boda?”

III

Too late, as usual, the friends of the defense began to acquire information concerning the members of this Commission. Robert Grant was one of the bitterest Italian-haters in New England. He had put it into a book, virtually labeling them a race of pickpockets. To a librarian in Washington he had expressed his violent opinion that Sacco and Vanzetti ought to be killed. To John F. Moors and Professor Morison of Harvard he had expressed disapproval of any one taking issue with the verdict at the trial, or with the subsequent decisions. Yet he considered that there was nothing in the way of his acting as an impartial arbitrator!

“Bob” Grant had begun life as a popular novelist in the genteel New England style. The rising plutocracy of America had resorted to his works to learn the circumstances under which toothpicks should not be used, and similar lessons in the conduct of a good life. He had been awarded a small-salaried position as probate judge, where he had displayed an unusual talent for sarcasm, and an air of being much too good for mundane affairs. He was now seventy-five years of age, and was retired from service on the bench, which left him free to pass judgment upon Italians. A frail, pathetic, querulous, old man, he sat in the stifling heat of midsummer, suffering greatly, sometimes closing his eyes--but that does not always mean that a judge is not paying heed. Judge Grant heeded with an air of boredom, of extreme suspicion, and discourtesy of a kind which does not come naturally, but has to be cultivated as a fine art. When he ventured an opinion, it was of an infantile nature. “Why, Mr. Thompson, you find everybody wrong! You say harsh things about Mr. Katzmann, who seems to be an estimable gentleman!”

The elderly judge’s attitude was curiously revealed in the matter of Mr. George U. Crocker, formerly treasurer of the City of Boston, who told about the behavior of Judge Thayer. Mr. Crocker had never been introduced to Thayer, but had had the judge’s acquaintance forced upon him in the University Club; Thayer had come to his table at breakfast, uninvited, and sat down and compelled Crocker to hear him scold and denounce the “arnychists,” and read passages from his decisions: “There, I guess that will hold them!” Finally Mr. Crocker had instructed the head-waiter not to permit Judge Thayer to join him at table. When Mr. Crocker told the Commission about this, Judge Grant inquired, “Mr. Crocker, do I understand that you are repeating what was said to you at a social club by a fellow member of that club?” In other words, the secrets of a gentleman’s club were more sacred than the lives of two wops!

President Stratton, of “M.I.T.,” as it was known, was the youngest of the Commission, being only sixty-eight. He came from Illinois--a great handicap in Boston, which considers Worcester the far west. He was a physicist, and had risen by competence in science--including the science of knowing the rich and what they wanted. Four years ago he had been taken into the sacred circle of the Back Bay, and now he would have needed tremendous moral courage to oppose a domineering person like President Lowell. A capable administrator but with no reflective capacity, his social opinions had been indicated by his banning a speaker against militarism from the Y. M. C. A. of his great institute.

A. Lawrence Lowell had been born to that apex of greatness in Boston, which permits the fortunate one to be eccentric. He rode about Cambridge in an elderly high motor-car painted a brilliant Harvard crimson, and decorated with as much polished brass-work as a yacht. He carried his papers in an old green bag, and wore a coat-skirt which he switched as he walked; Heywood Broun, who had seen his figure in the Harvard “yard,” wrote that he “ambled sedately to a hanging.” He had a face of cold virtue, and from all persons less important than himself he exacted the most rigid conformance to propriety. He was wholly lacking in enthusiasms, and appeals to him to recognize the beauty of anarchist character froze on the speaker’s tongue. He cultivated both in writing and in speaking a style which for dullness could not be exceeded in the college world. A stiff legal mind, made wholly out of precedents, he had facility and self-esteem, and could be extremely genial when he wanted something, such as an endowment. On the other hand, if a common person said or did anything out of the ordinary, he would reveal a remarkable talent for ungraciousness.

Injustice did not exist in the world; it was a delusion contrived by cunning agitators, and they were not going to fool the mighty mind of the President of Harvard University. A characteristic moment early during the hearing, when the witness Pierce, a shoe-worker who had refused to identify Sacco as the bandit, told how he had lost his job at the factory for this refusal; he was “fired,” and one of the convicting jurymen had taken his place. Also another witness had lost his position for refusing to identify. “What does this tend to prove?” demanded the irritable Judge Grant. The answer of the lawyers was, “It proves duress.” Said Lowell, with contempt which took in lawyers, witnesses, and his own colleague: “Oh, don’t you see, they claim this was all nothing but a frame-up.”

Infallibility was his prerogative upon three different counts: as a millionaire, as a college president, and as a Lowell. There was a popular quatrain about the city of Boston, as “the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.” Never for an instant did it occur to this great man to doubt that he could wade into a mass of complications and determine the truth in a month. With complete insouciance he would make statements of fact about crime and criminals, which experts knew to be nonsense. “This cannot be so” ... “they do not do that” ... and so on.

The fallibilities of academic autocracy were strikingly revealed in the reception accorded to an eccentric lady who was sent over by Governor Fuller to tell her story to the Commission. Let “Tootsie Toodles” be her name--it was no less melodious. The newspapers had called her a “mystery witness,” but she was no mystery to the defense--on the contrary, an open volume, ancient and much handled. She was, according to Lowell’s euphemistic phrase, “not unimpeachable in conduct”; also she was an hysterical fantast. Prior to the Dedham trial, she had come to the defense lawyer, and told an elaborate story, offering to repeat it on the witness-stand. But there was some dispute about the price, and she went to the prosecution and offered to tell a story for them. She went back and forth between the two sides, until she had ruined herself with both--they realized that she was mentally irresponsible.

Ranney, the assistant district attorney representing the government at the Lowell hearings, knew all this, and admitted the woman’s “not unimpeachable” record. He grinned at the scene; when the three old gentlemen were not watching, he made motions of wheels going round in his head--a schoolboy sign for an insane person. There came a former employer of Tootsie, Mr. Jackson, and the commission asked him, “What of her mentality?” The answer was, “She’s twelve ounces to the pound.” President Lowell of Harvard inquired, “What does that mean?” and the witness replied. “She’s not all there.” The great educator enlarged his vocabulary considerably before he got through with this adventure--it was a sort of slumming expedition for him. They brought in the former chief of police of South Braintree, who said that he had known Tootsie since she was born, and she was “what you’d call a nut.” But he was mistaken; Mr. Lowell would never have called any person or anything by a word of one syllable.

The three important gentlemen, looking for any sort of evidence to save the good name of their Commonwealth, received Tootsie--it would not be proper to say with open arms, considering her “not unimpeachable conduct”--but with that polished and perfected elegance which blue-blood gentlemen display to all ladies when they meet them socially. When Tootsie stood up, they all stood up, and bowed--it was like a court reception, or a Harvard commencement.

Her story was that she had known Sacco in the year 1908, when they had both worked in the Rice and Hutchins shoe-factory--he was a “laster,” she said. She had seen him on the street in South Braintree on April 15th, 1920, a few hours before the crime, standing near the alleged bandit car. She heard a man whom she declared to be Vanzetti say to him, “Hurry up and finish this job. I have to be back in Providence at three o’clock and dig clams.”

There were slight errors in this story. It wasn’t Providence to which Vanzetti had to get back; they don’t dig clams in Providence, so it must have been Plymouth. Also it was a slip about Sacco having been a “laster” in the Rice and Hutchins factory in 1908, for in April of that year he had landed in America, a lad of seventeen who had never seen a shoe-factory. He had gone to work carrying water to laborers in Hopedale, and it wasn’t until four years later, after his marriage, that he had learned shoe-work.

All this, of course, was known to Thompson, and he set out to establish it. His first question was: “What time did you say that Sacco first worked in the Rice and Hutchins factory, what year?”

And Tootsie, who knew what he was driving at, started up and began to scream. “What is the idea of my coming up and talking with you when I come in here to-day to have my character overhauled? Has my character got anything to do with what I saw and what I heard?”

Said Lowell, majestically: “You will oblige the Committee by answering questions. We won’t allow your character to be assailed.”

Said Tootsie, louder yet--so loud that for the first time the newspaper reporters could attend the sessions through the tightly closed doors: “My character is just as good as yours, or Sacco’s or Vanzetti’s, or any of that gang that you have got down there and what they do. I will not allow my character to be overhauled.”

Said Lowell: “Nobody is overhauling your character.”

Said Ranney, the assistant district attorney: “Answer that question.”

So Tootsie replied: “1908.” She added: “If I am wrong I will say I am wrong.” Even the members of the Commission smiled at this. But their appreciation of it was superficial; they could hardly be expected to realize that Tootsie, entirely by accident, had provided the best summing up of the Boston Brahmins to be found in the literature of the world. If I am wrong I will say that I am wrong! But don’t you dare to say it!

For an hour Thompson read passages from Tootsie’s earlier statement, inconsistent with the story she was now telling; and always her answer was that the stenographer was crooked and had written the wrong answers. She became more and more excited, and screamed louder and louder, until Lowell stopped the proceedings, and Judge Grant, greatly agitated, toddled across the room, exclaiming, “I will get her a glass of ice-water.” He trembled so that he poured a part of it down her neck.

Ranney came out of the room disgusted, and told the reporters that Tootsie was “so loud” and “so unreliable” that Katzmann had refused to use her, for fear she would “break up the case.” So the reporters for once had an “inside” story. They published it, to the annoyance of the Commission, and also of Tootsie. She read, and set out forthwith for the office of the Boston Post, a perfectly respectable capitalist newspaper, strongly Catholic. She interviewed a reporter, and told him that the stories were all wrong, that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti to be quite innocent of the crime of which they had been convicted. The person she had seen in South Braintree was the brother of a friend of hers, who happened to look like Sacco. The Post published this correction; and the defense produced the Post report before the Commission, to prove what had happened.

The lawyers for the defense naturally took it for granted that the absurdity of the whole affair was obvious. But when the report of the Commission appeared, they discovered to their consternation that the three elderly gallants had accepted Tootsie Toodles as one of their reasons for sending Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair! Said the greatest man in Massachusetts, and therefore in the world:

“The woman is eccentric, not unimpeachable in conduct; but the Committee believe that in this case her testimony was well worth consideration.”

Two things the three elderly gentlemen desired ardently to do: one, to prove that the defense at the Dedham trial had hired perjury; the other to break the alibi of Sacco in Boston on the day of the South Braintree crime. Everything which they did upon their own initiative was directed to these two ends; and it was only while this was going on that they failed to be impatient and bored. They had laid down the program that they would themselves summon no witnesses except the members of the jury, and Messrs. Katzmann and Thayer. But in the midst of the proceedings they suddenly forgot this rule, and without warning to the defense lawyers summoned to the State House two Italians, Bosco and Guadagni, who had testified at the Dedham trial that Sacco had had lunch with them on the day of the crime.

The Italians were asked to repeat their story, which owed its certainty as to date to the fact that it was the day of a banquet given to Williams, editor of the Transcript. Guadagni, a socialist, had been rebuked by Sacco and the others for proposing to attend an affair in honor of a militarist. Guadagni was the orator whom Cornelia had met during the Plymouth Cordage strike, a friend of Vanzetti’s from the beginning, and original organizer of the defense committee; he had become one of the editors of an Italian daily paper, La Notizia. A ruddy-cheeked little man with sharply-pointed black beard and mustaches, speaking English with an accent, he told the three great gentlemen of the Governor’s Commission what he remembered; and then to his astonishment he became the object of a persistent attack by the President of Harvard University, who thought he had the Italian trapped in a fraud. Ten days previously Lowell had consulted the files of the Boston Transcript, and found that there had been no banquet to Williams on April 15th; he had consulted the files of the Gazzetta del Massachusetts, an Italian weekly, and both papers agreed that the banquet to Williams had been on May 13th. Williams, now in Washington, had been consulted, and agreed that that was correct.

An unhappy moment for the two lawyers, Thompson and Ehrmann, representing the Sacco-Vanzetti defense in its later stages. They had had nothing to do with the Dedham trial, and if there had been any “framing” of witnesses, they did not know it. They had received no warning in this matter of Bosco and Guadagni, and so, of course, they were helpless. “Might there not possibly have been two banquets?” suggested Thompson; but Lowell waved that inept suggestion aside with a peculiar little gesture of the hand, a series of quick motions, characteristic of him. “Do not disturb the operations of this mighty brain,” it seemed to say. Aloud he replied, “No, no, no, it cannot be. I have investigated the matter.” The lawyer, greatly distressed, turned against his own witnesses, saying that Mr. Lowell was a man of honor, and the witnesses should admit the whole truth.

A trying situation for two humble self-educated strangers, there in the stately executive chambers under the golden dome. Said Guadagni: “If I am not crazy, there was banquet on fifteenth April. If I not tell truth I go jail.” He insisted that he would find a record of it, and Lowell waved him aside with a gesture of disgust; all these wops were alike, there was no truth in them. “Very well,” said he. “Bring the record to-morrow morning if you find it.” And the pair went crestfallen away.

VII

But next morning early they turned up at the law office of William G. Thompson, staggering under the weight of an enormous tome, the bound volume of Guadagni’s daily paper, La Notizia, for the year 1920. They laid it on the lawyer’s desk, open to the issue of April 16th, and translated word by word a half column account of the banquet to Williams on the previous day. The dinner had been a humble one, and the report said, “A more formal dinner will be given.” The two lawyers, who had been sunk in the depths of despair, now suddenly felt like schoolboys. “This saves the men!” exclaimed Thompson. “This is our case right here!”

The two middle-weight Italians, assisted by Gardner Jackson, lugged the huge tome to the State House with the golden dome, and sat all morning outside the tightly shut white doors. It happened to be the two-hour session with Tootsie Toodles, and they listened to the comedy, and shared the hilarity of the newspaper reporters. When Tootsie rushed out, screaming, they were ushered in, and the tome was spread out on the council table, and Guadagni offered to translate it for Lowell--thereby giving offense, and being informed that the president of Harvard University read Italian fluently. There was a long silence while the three gentlemen read, more or less fluently; and finally the President of Harvard University turned from the reading and shook hands with the two Italians. “Gentlemen, I was under an impression which I find was mistaken. I apologize.”

A stirring scene: the greatest man in Massachusetts, and therefore in the whole world, apologizing to two wops! What more could two wops want? Or two lawyers? Thompson advanced the idea that the Commission should make some acknowledgment of the fact that the alibi had been established. Trying to make something out of the incident for Sacco and Vanzetti! But the great academic brain saw the ruse. That would come in due time; that was an affair for deliberation. Lowell did go so far as to say that he would give to the Governor an adequate account of the evidence produced. But for the rest--no publicity! More quick little waves of the imperious right hand. He reminded them sternly that they were under pledge not to report anything about what happened at these sessions.

Silence! Never so long as time endures must the populace know that the University President of the Blue-bloods has been humiliated!

Some time later the defense got their copy of the stenographic record of what had taken place, and they discovered thirty-two pages of the attempt of Lowell to break down the testimony of Bosco and Guadagni, but not a single line about the apology he had been compelled to make! No reference to the dialogue that took place, nor to the argument of defense counsel! There was a brief parenthetic note to the effect that Bosco and Guadagni had brought in the files of La Notizia, but not a word to show that the alibi testimony had thereby been restored to credibility!

So was Joe Randall justified of his statement to Cornelia Thornwell, “Your dolly is stuffed with sawdust!” Of his prophecy that the haughtiest and most righteous blue-blood gentlemen would “doctor the record,” exactly as “Web” Thayer, the vulgarian, had done! When Cornelia heard that story, and got the full significance of it, she went away to her own room, and sank down upon the bed and sobbed. It became a sort of prayer: “Oh, God, let me die! Take me away! I am a fool, and all my people are fools!”

VIII

In the meantime, through this hot month of July, Governor Fuller was continuing the hearings in his own chamber in the same State House. “I feel myself obligated to hear anybody they send”--so he declared; and several times each week he motored up from his summer-home, escorted by two police cars. The witnesses would file through his rooms, and then go away in silence; a régime of secrecy modified by rumors and whispers. If the witness was one who had testified at either trial, the reporters would look up the previous testimony, and say that the witness had told that same story to the Governor. If the witness had said anything new that was injurious to Sacco or Vanzetti, the reporters could get it in a round-about way. Otherwise they would call it a “mystery witness.”

Each day the Governor’s impatience grew, and the pretense of impartiality wore thinner. Ladies of refinement who had attended the Dedham trial had the disagreeable experience of talking with a man who made perfectly evident his belief that they were lying. Witnesses who had one definite thing to tell would be challenged to tell some other thing, and humiliated because they could not do it. Robert Benchley, one of the editors of Life, came from New York to make statements about the ravings of Judge Thayer at the golf-club of Worcester; to his surprise he was challenged to point out one passage in the entire record indicating that the trial had not been a fair one. Since Benchley had never seen the record, he was “stumped”, like everyone who interviewed the Governor. But he took the Governor’s advice and studied the record; and then he took the trouble to write the Governor a letter, pointing out many passages indicating unfairness. Like everyone else who did this, he got no response.

Still stranger the experience of John J. Richards, lawyer of Providence, Rhode Island, who had been United States marshal during the war, and had arrested the Morelli gang, and had them all sent to prison. He received a telegram requesting him to call on the Governor of Massachusetts, and he came, at his own expense. He was asked, abruptly, “What do you know about the Sacco-Vanzetti case?” He replied, “I know nothing.” Said Fuller, triumphantly, “I thought so!” Richards naturally wondered why he had been invited, and suggested that possibly it might be because of what he knew about the Morellis and Madeiros. Said the Governor sharply, “That matter is closed. The Madeiros confession is an invention.” Then he proceeded to cross-question his visitor: “Are you in the employ of the Defense Committee?” Said Richards, much startled, “I am not. I know nothing of such a committee.”

Here was a former officer of the law, explaining what he believed was the truth; and the supersalesman received him as a suspected criminal. “What do you know about the South Braintree crime? Why did you wait six years to come around and tell about it? Have you ever been in South Braintree? How did they get you in on this Madeiros thing?” And so on.

Mr. Richards came out from under the golden dome in something of a daze, and went to Ehrmann’s office. Rosina Sacco happened to be there--tormented little woman, drawn and haggard, with her daughter Inez, six years old, born after her father’s arrest. Richards listened pityingly while she voiced her hopes in the Governor; afterwards he said to the lawyer, “You might as well shut up shop. Those men are as good as dead now. Fuller has no intention whatever of considering the evidence on their behalf.”

An author had written from California to the Governor, pleading with him to go and meet the two alleged bandits, and judge their characters. It was the author’s idea that no one could encounter the soul of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and consider him a bandit. But the owner of the Packard Motor Car Company of New England would show the author a new line in souls. One morning the Governor left the State House, and stepped into his car with police-officers, and sped away without warning to Charlestown Prison.

Bart and Nick, as the sentences now stood, were to be executed on August 10th, and were both in strict confinement; the little walk across the prison yard which the prisoners got out of this interview was their first glimpse of daylight for nearly a month. Both of the men were on a “hungry strike”; they were going to starve themselves to death, as protest against the secrecy of the Governor’s hearings. But modern labor and suffrage agitation has established in the minds of wardens and jailers the fact that human beings do not die of starvation for a long time. Bart, on his seventh day of a fast, was able to walk cheerfully across the prison yard to the warden’s office.

The Governor and the wop sat down together--no other witness. But later on, of course, Bart told his friends about it. The Governor had a question firmly fixed in his head, and which he used as a means of “stumping” witnesses: “Why did not Vanzetti take the stand at the Plymouth trial?” He now asked this question of Vanzetti. Since the answer involved the whole story of Vanzetti’s radical beliefs, and his relations to lawyers of Catholic and capitalist mentality, he was still answering at the end of an hour.

The Governor had to leave then, because Lindbergh had come to Boston. The Governor was due at a reception, but he promised to come back and hear the rest of Vanzetti’s answer. He made his escape through the warden’s home, running quickly to avoid the picture-snapping newspapermen. They reported that he seemed greatly flustered; he knocked off his straw hat while jumping into his car. Could it be that a rabid anarchist had said something to offend the sensibilities of the owner of the Packard Motor Car Company of New England? A picturesque story, of which the newspapers would have made much more, if there had not been the flying colonel, and also a million dollar prize fight to be featured the next morning!

The great man came again, and talked with Vanzetti for two hours. Like all salesmen, he had learned to be agreeable; he wore his fixed professional smile, and shook hands with Bart at least ten times, so Bart declared. That a man could “smile and smile and be a villain still” was a thing not dreamed of in the philosophy of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and he poured out his heart, and explained his ideas--he took the matter so seriously that he wrote a long letter adding things he had overlooked. Bart told his lawyers he was sure the Governor would not execute a man to whom he had behaved with such great courtesy. And the lawyers also found the Governor’s manner encouraging. Said His Excellency, genially, “I wanted to tell Vanzetti to eat!” And again, “Isn’t Vanzetti an attractive man!”--it might have been a schoolgirl instead of a supersalesman.

His Excellency also summoned Sacco to the warden’s office, and tried to have a conversation; but this did not come off so well. Sacco was polite, but not to be taken in by supersalesmanship. The conversation, relieved of Italian dialect, ran somewhat as follows:

“Sacco, I want to have a talk with you.”

“There is nothing for me to say.”

“But I want your version of this matter.”

“I have not asked for a pardon.”

“But I would like to hear your story.”

“What is the use? You have your tendencies, and you could not see mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I am a poor man and you are a rich man, and we have nothing in common.”

“But I was a poor man once. I worked in a rubber shop at seven-fifty a week.”

“Yes, but now you are a millionaire, and your money thinks for you. I have nothing to say.”

So the interview ended. Sacco was very gentle about it, and afterwards he became a trifle remorseful. He said, “I didn’t treat him right. He outdid me in courtesy. But I wanted him to know the truth. He won’t see it the right way, and why should I let him fool himself?” Sacco was the man with a formula; and for once the formula happened to fit.

Also the Governor summoned Madeiros to the warden’s office; and here was the supersalesman handling a different line of goods. Madeiros had taken the burden of the South Braintree crime upon himself, and thereby put the ruling class of Massachusetts in an uncomfortable position. Naturally, they would pay a price to get out of it. Said the Governor--if the story of a prison employee may be credited:

“Madeiros, I understand that you are sore because you didn’t get a square deal from the government.”

“Yes, sir, that is so.”

“The district attorney double-crossed you, I understand.”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

“Well, if that is so, I might do something for you. Of course, there is nothing in this South Braintree story of yours.”

“What I told about South Braintree is the truth.”

“Oh! In that case I won’t do anything for you. You are guilty of two murders!”

On the 25th of July the Lowell Commission heard arguments of counsel. For five hours William G. Thompson analyzed every aspect of the case, and if his speech could have been listened to by the thinking people of America, it would have saved the lives of his clients. But the speech was heard only by three elderly autocrats, one of whom had a tendency to appear to be dozing, while another had great respect for what the third was thinking. We may imagine the third thinking as follows: “You are an able lawyer, and are performing an intellectual feat, but I do not need you to tell me what to think.”

Not all the evidence in the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been discovered; the defense would keep on finding it, up to within a few hours of the execution. But most of it was now available, and it seemed as if the Great Novelist who makes up history had been concerned to take every item of evidence produced by the prosecution at the Dedham trial, and wipe it out by a later discovery. Even to that cap picked up at the scene of the crime, which the district attorney had striven so hard to fit onto Sacco’s head, and which “Web” Thayer had striven so unjudicially to force a witness to identify as Sacco’s!

The main point about this cap had been that it had holes in the lining, and the “theory” was that the holes had been due to Sacco’s habit of hanging the cap on a nail in the factory. There had been a great amount of testimony on this point, and Katzmann had made the most of it in his speech to the jury. In his later arguments before Thayer he had gone so far as to say: “that alone was enough to warrant the conviction of the defendant Sacco.” The issue had been carried to the Supreme Judicial Court, and made the subject of a special ruling; after which Judge Thayer had made both cap and ruling the subject of special emphasis. In rejecting the last bill of exceptions, he had summed up the proposition as follows:

“In the lining of that cap there were nail-holes, which the Commonwealth claimed were made by the nail upon which this cap had been hung. Now the Supreme Judicial Court has said, in the decision of these cases, that that evidence was competent, because it tended to prove that that cap belonged to Sacco; and if the jury should find such to be the fact, then Sacco was present at the time of the shooting.”

Such had been the word of Supreme Justice on the matter of a ragged and dirty “pepper-and-salt” colored cap with earlaps! A man’s life had depended upon it, and depended upon it still! And now, before the Lowell Commission came ex-Chief of Police Gallivan of South Braintree, telling the true story, never before revealed. The cap had been handed to him by the shoe company superintendent, and the chief had carried it under the seat of his automobile for at least ten days, possibly twice as long; he had made the holes in the lining, while looking for some mark of identification; then he had passed the cap on to police officer Scott; and neither Gallivan nor Scott had been put upon the witness-stand, to tell the jury how those holes had come to be!

Why Chief Gallivan had been passed by as a witness for the prosecution was obvious enough--he was too plain-spoken a man. To the Lowell Commission he summed up the Dedham trial in one pungent formula; and if the three old gentlemen had thrown out the whole record, and confined themselves to Gallivan’s one formula, they would have earned the thanks of posterity. Said the Chief: “The Government would put on a witness and then the defense would rush in to offset it, and I guess Katzmann was just as wise; he would dig up one to offset him. The case appeared to be to see who could get the biggest crowd. In other words, to see who could tell the biggest lies.”

Also the matter of Vanzetti’s revolver, which was supposed to have belonged to Berardelli, the slain paymaster. According to the “theory,” Berardelli had dropped it, and Sacco had picked it up, carried it off, and given it to Vanzetti. There was no evidence that Berardelli had had his revolver with him at the time of the shooting--he had taken it to a repair place, and there was no record to show he had got it back. No one had seen him with a revolver at the time of the crime. The sole basis of the “theory” was that Vanzetti’s revolver happened to be of the same make as the one Berardelli had owned. The prosecution had put on the stand an expert from the factory, who had been a former federal agent, and had led the jury to believe that he thought the two revolvers were identical. But now, before the Lowell Commission, he admitted that he had felt prejudice at the trial, and that his testimony had been misconstrued. Said the witness Lincoln Wadsworth:

“But I have felt that I had created the impression that there was a possibility that that was the pistol. Well, that is just a possibility.... There is just the one possibility in the number of pistols a factory of that kind happens to make. There was no distinguishing number so that you could tell that that was the pistol.”

The witness went on to tell about his interviews with the assistant district attorney, and how the latter had failed to be interested in having the truth made clear:

“But Mr. Williams did not seem to want to have that at all, so that I just let be on it. And then in the court-room I felt sure I would have a chance to say the same thing that I have said here, but when the time came to be cross-examined I simply was not, that was all, and I went down on the records, as I thought, and still think, that while not a direct statement that that was the pistol, it might lead to the impression that that was the pistol.” And then, summing up the whole matter: “There are thousands of times more chances that it was not than that it was.”

So it went, with detail after detail; impossible to find a single one that stood the test of time! Every one of the prosecution’s “star” witnesses was ruined. Mary Splaine had told Henry Hellyer twice that she did not see the faces of the bandits, and the detective had written it down at the time--for use of the shoe company and the insurance company, and their allies, the police and the district attorney. Goodridge was a horse thief, his very name a perjury; he had sent two men to the electric chair to escape a jail-sentence, and the district attorney and the judge had refused to allow this to be brought before the jury. Pelzer had told many persons that he did not see the bandits; so had “Fainting Lola” Andrews. Both of them had made affidavits to this effect--and then taken them back, so that you might believe them either way, or neither.

Not one rag of evidence to cover the naked prejudice of three elderly autocrats! The collapse became so complete that it was a matter for jesting; there was even a haberdasher, to visit the prison and measure the left hand of Sacco! Mary Splaine had based her identification of the bandit upon his “good-sized left hand”--seen at a distance of eighty feet for a period of one or two seconds. Now came the haberdasher, testifying that Sacco’s left hand was smaller than normal. Governor Fuller’s way of meeting that detail was to take Mary Splaine out on the street and invite her to describe a man in an automobile at the proper distance. But, alas, he did this in front of the State House with the golden dome, and there was not any cobbler-shop to cut off Mary’s view at the end of one or two seconds; nor was Mary up in the second story, looking down amid the wild excitement of a bandit raid, in imminent peril of shots.

There had been a million words of the Dedham trial testimony, and few persons had ever digested it all; Cornelia Thornwell, who had been studying it for six years, knew how hard was the task. Certainly the Dedham jury had not done it, much as they might assure the Governor and his commission that they had given a fair trial. Certainly the Governor had not digested it, for when you referred to witnesses by name, Mary Splaine and Lola Andrews were about the only ones he could remember. Certainly the three old gentlemen had not done so, for they made pitiful slips and asked helpless questions. But now came a great lawyer, William G. Thompson, having sat up nights with those volumes for several years, and presenting to the Commission a summary of their contents.

For example, a study of Sacco’s sartorial career in South Braintree on the 15th of April, 1920, as presented by the government witnesses. At half-past eleven Lola Andrews had talked with him lying under an automobile, wearing a dark suit. Five minutes later, a hesitating witness thought he had seen him in front of a drug-store, dressed “respectably.” Less than an hour later, according to another uncertain witness, he was smoking a cigarette in the depot, wearing dark “ordinary wearing apparel” and a soft black hat. When he actually shot Berardelli, he had changed into dark green pants and a brown army shirt, according to Pelzer. A few seconds later, he passed within Mary Splaine’s vision, having changed to a gray woolen shirt, and wearing no hat or coat at all; but having lost a cap at the scene of the murder, although he had made his first appearance in a soft felt hat. A few yards further on, Sacco had resumed his dark suit--if one could believe the witness Goodridge.

There were many thousand words like that in Thompson’s argument; and who could dispute the lawyer’s final statement, that Sacco and Vanzetti had “never had the kind of trial required by English tradition and by American constitutional law as a prerequisite to taking away their lives”?

XII

Anguish in the hearts of all friends of the defense; they knew that the decision was going against them--even while they would not admit it to themselves. Pitiful the plight of hard-working and law-abiding lawyers, who had made all the proper moves, and won the chess-game a dozen times over--and now their opponents would dump the board and throw the chessmen into their faces! While Vanzetti sat in his cell and wrote memories of his mother, and Sacco composed a farewell letter to his son, men and women whose hearts were too tender for this grim world thought up frantic new schemes to move public opinion, and raced about like ants in a nest which has been stepped on.

Jessica Henderson motored Cornelia Thornwell to New Haven, where lived Mrs. Berardelli, the widow of the slain guard. With them went Musmanno, and a Mrs. Florence, who had testified at the Dedham trial, that Mrs. Berardelli had said to her that the hold-up would never have succeeded if her husband had had his gun with him. (It was the gun Vanzetti was supposed to have picked up after the murder.)

The group now appealed to the woman’s sympathies, and she agreed that it would not help either her dead husband or his widow and orphans to take the lives of two men who might possibly be innocent. She consented to send a telegram to the Governor, appealing for clemency. “Write it now,” said Mrs. Florence; but the woman said for Mrs. Florence to write it, she would be satisfied with whatever they sent. So Mrs. Florence and the party drove to the nearest railroad depot, and wrote a message and sent it, and it made a front-page story in the newspapers next morning.

But it took the enemy only a few hours to counter that move. They came to the woman and frightened her, and the Boston newspapers carried a story to the effect that the telegram had been sent, not by Mrs. Berardelli, but by an unknown woman from a railroad depot. The ladies made another trip to New Haven--but only to discover that Mrs. Berardelli wouldn’t “have anything more to do with it.” Returning to Boston, the ladies called upon the Associated Press representative, explaining the circumstances, and asking him to correct the error. The response of the Associated Press was to put on the wires all over the country the statement that Mrs. Berardelli declared she had never seen the telegram which had been sent in her name. It happened to be strictly the fact; but it wasn’t quite the truth!

Edward Holton James was a New Englander of the old sort; he lived in Concord, just across the field from the home of Emerson, which possibly had affected his mind. He was a nephew of Henry James, the novelist who wrote like a philosopher, and of William James, the philosopher who wrote like a novelist. His wife was a Cushing, and wealthy, so he had everything that a citizen of Concord could have to make him respectable; but it didn’t keep him out of jail.

Mr. James had spotted certain flaws in the “theory.” He had noted the fact that the so-called “bandit-car” with the bullet-hole through the door had been in the hands of the police for hours before any of the numerous examinations had revealed the conspicuous bullet-hole; also he had measured the “Coacci shed,” and proved that you couldn’t drive two cars into it, as the “theory” required. Now he went down to South Braintree to reproduce the events of the hold-up, and prove that some of the witnesses could not have seen what they claimed. But the selectmen of South Braintree were not going to let the streets of their town be used for Bolshevik propaganda if they knew it, and they arrested Mr. James, in spite of both his ancestry and his money.

And then a little later Beltrando Brini had a bright idea: if the story he had told at the Plymouth trial was fiction, then he was a perjurer. He had told the story to the Governor, and had not been believed; so he drafted a letter to the Governor, asking to be arrested, and he took it about among the other alibi witnesses, and fourteen of them signed it, including Bosco and Guadagni, the two editors. Trando delivered it at the State House, and when no policeman came for him, he went back, with his mother and half a dozen of the other witnesses. It was near the end of the case, and the corridors were crowded with detectives and secret service men, with swarms of reporters--a sensational scene. The Governor was not in, said the secretary; and took the youth off into a room by himself for a “grilling.” Who had sent him, and what was this scheme for publicity? “This hurts you more than it helps.” And when Trando undertook to explain, “Don’t try to make a stump speech; the place for that is the Common.”

Said Trando, “I tried to speak on the Common yesterday, and I was stopped.”

“Don’t try to be a hero!” sneered the secretary. Heroes were not wanted at the State House, and Trando could not get arrested. Too bad he did not know about the room full of booze in the cellar! If he had told about that, he might have got his desire. As it was, he went away with tears in his eyes, his mother sobbing on his arm.

XIII

And yet there were moments of hope. Impossible to believe that a great business man and statesman could be such a hypocrite! Members of the defense committee came to see him, having heard the wild rumors, started from the State House, as to the millions that had been raised and expended for bribes. They offered to put their records at the disposal of the Governor; they had raised some $325,000 in seven years, and had vouchers for it all--bundles and bales of them stacked in a closet. Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan had worked for nearly two years without a cent. The Governor was surprised to hear it--he had been given to understand that they got fifty percent of every thing they raised. Little Joe Moro, the secretary, had worked for thirty dollars a week, and the only other wages paid in the office were for typists. The Governor was cordial, he seemed to like Joe immensely, shook hands with him several times--he was a good fellow, and everything was all right, don’t worry!

But that was in the privacy of his office, the tricks of a supersalesman; molasses catches more flies than vinegar. Publicly the Governor said nothing, and the rumors continued to fly. Professor Frankfurter had got fifteen thousand dollars from the New York World for writing an editorial; he had got one hundred and fifty thousand from the committee for writing the Atlantic Monthly article. The very dignified editor of the Springfield Republican was accused of having received twenty thousand dollars from the committee for one famous editorial. The “State House crowd” lived in such an atmosphere of cash payment that they could not imagine how gentlemen felt about such matters.

Also they lived in an atmosphere of terror. It seemed as if there were as many detectives as real workers under the golden dome. Assuredly, there were more spies than there were friends of the defense; one of them put on a Windsor tie and got himself regularly arrested with the pickets. Every one who had anything to do with the case was shadowed; servants would be offered money for the contents of trash-baskets. All officials having to do with the case, the Supreme Court judges and later on even the jurors, had guards on their homes day and night, and wives trembled every time their husbands went outdoors.

There was fear; and there were newspapers printing headlines and selling editions, making every bomb-scare into a gold mine. Relatives of the Johnson family, the garage people who had testified against Sacco and Vanzetti, had had their rear porch blown up while they were in bed. That made a newspaper story, and helped to damn Sacco and Vanzetti. The police decided that it was a bootleggers’ quarrel; but that fact was not revealed--the bootleggers being such liberal paymasters of the police. A threatening letter was mailed to one of the witnesses, and this turned out to be a prank of some boys; the newspapers published the letter on the front page, and never published the true story. Such is journalism, which lives upon sensation, and prints its enormous editions with blood instead of ink.

XIV

The Lowell Commission had finished its hearings and retired into privacy to deliberate. But meanwhile the Governor went on hearing witnesses. They streamed through his office, as many as thirty in one day; all sorts of persons who claimed to have information about the case. Many came secretly, and went away, their names known only to him; they whispered into his ear, and he was supposed to sort out truth from rumor. A hundred times over, in conversations and arguments, he would show that he could not do it, that he had, in fact, no idea of the difference. “Why, I heard it right here in this room!” he would say; and that proved it true.

On the other hand, impossible to satisfy him with any evidence that proved what he did not want to believe! He had got his mind fixed on the Bridgewater conviction, which would prove Vanzetti an habitual criminal. You pointed to Vanzetti’s eighteen alibi witnesses, all decent working people, and the Governor would find it suspicious that they talked so much about eels. “But where is the express receipt showing that he got the eels?” The case seemed to hang on that, so the defense set out to look for express records in Plymouth. They discovered that the records, nearly eight years old, had been destroyed. Incidentally, they discovered that a state detective had already made an investigation, and ascertained that they had been destroyed.

They decided they would outwit him, even so. They would look for the receipts of fish-dealers who had sold the eels. Herbert B. Ehrmann, junior counsel, went to consult Vanzetti in Charlestown prison. It was hard for him to remember--he had been accustomed to buy fish from several dealers in Boston. The lawyer went according to his vague description, with Felicani for translator; they hunted at the “fish-pier” in South Boston, but found no one who remembered selling to Vanzetti. Joe Randall got another Italian--two gangs searching. At last, after visiting seven Italian fish-dealers on Atlantic Avenue, the “Guinney market,” they found one who said that “B. Vanzetti of Plymouth” had been a customer of his. Had he any records? For a year or two, yes--but seven years, eight years--no, no, giammai! He had changed his partnership in the meantime.

But they argued--could they make a search? The life of two compatriots might depend on it! Yes, there were old papers up in the loft. So up they go, among dust and cobwebs, with an electric flashlight. Old boxes of papers, in bad Italian script--sheafs of loose ledger leaves, but the earliest date is January, 1920. “For God’s sake, haven’t you got any before that?”

The Italian has got interested--it is a story! “There’s an old case, maybe stuff in that.” A big box shoved under the rafters, tightly nailed up. “Must have a hammer to open it.” Stacks and stacks of old papers: and among them blocks of American Express Company receipts, signed by the expressman, day by day as he called for shipments. And the dates--here are some for 1919--and here is December, 1919! And in the middle of the block, one reading: “B. Vanzetti, Plymouth, one barrel eels!”

Hurrah! We have it! We have them licked! The date is December 20th, which was a Saturday, the very date Bart claimed the eels had been shipped, to be sure to reach him on Tuesday, and got ready for selling the next day! And they are live eels, so the dealer says, you can tell that by the weight of the barrel! Dead eels would be heavier!

Young fellows dancing in a dusty loft! Our wops are saved! They go back to the office with shining eyes. They go to the Governor’s office. “We have found the evidence the Governor asked for.” This to the private secretary--the Governor himself is busy. “Indeed?” says the secretary. No shining in those hard eyes! “When are you going to stop bringing evidence?”

They will not trust the precious papers to him, but insist upon seeing Wiggin, the Governor’s counsel. Then they go away, and wait--and nothing happens; the next time they see the Governor, they mention the matter, and he says, “What does that prove? What evidence is there that Vanzetti ever received the shipment? I understand that the eels were never claimed; they were frozen in the depot.”

Says Joe Randall, gnashing his teeth: “It is like that fairy-story we used to enjoy when we were children--how the little tailor wooed the king’s daughter. ‘Go slay me the dragon,’ says the king--so the hero goes and slays the dragon, and comes back, but he doesn’t get the king’s daughter. ‘Go slay me the three giants,’ says the king--so he goes and slays the three giants, and comes back, but he doesn’t get the king’s daughter. ‘Go slay me the man-killing boar,’ says the king--and the longer the story, the more fun it is.”

The supersalesman had evolved a regular set of formulas, by which he challenged the witnesses who came to him. Of Italians he would ask: “Are you an anarchist? Are you a friend of Sacco or Vanzetti? Are you a member of the committee? Have you any friends on the committee? Who sent you here?” To be “sent” was a sinister thing, a sign of an elaborate conspiracy in operation.

For Americans the procedure was more subtle. The first question was: “Have you read the record?” If you answered “No,” then you were disqualified. The Governor had read the record, so he said. If you answered, “Yes,” the question would be, “Where did you get it?”--for the defense had only two transcripts of the full testimony, and two or three copies of the “bill of exceptions,” usually called “the record.” If you were able to convince him that you had had access to any of these, he would say, “Have you interviewed the witnesses?” And of course that would “stump” you; how could any one interview the witnesses, when the lawyers for the defense couldn’t even get the Governor’s secretary to give them the names and addresses of the witnesses? You would answer, “No,” and the Governor would reply, “Well, I know about this case, and you don’t.”

All that mass of complications--a million words of printed testimony, and many times that much spoken into one human ear--and he really thought he could carry it all! Serene, even jaunty, he would come into his office, wearing his automatic smile, and greeting the reporters, “Good morning, boys, a fine day!” He did not ask for help, and gave no thanks when it was offered. Hjalmar Branting, a lawyer from Sweden, son of the prime minister, came over to study the case, and devoted a month to it, becoming certain that the men were innocent. He was granted an hour, and the Governor spent five minutes talking about Sacco and Vanzetti, and the rest talking about the market for automobiles in Sweden. A thrifty supersalesman, making hay even while the thunder rolled and the lightning split the sky!

The floods of mail poured in. Trucks came, bringing masses of petitions; some thirty packages, registered, from France, representing three million signatures, patiently collected at workingmen’s meetings. They were burned in the basement furnaces, at night, when the heat would not be troublesome. Messenger boys brought telegrams by the bundle; they were sorted out, one kind for the newspapers, the other for the fires. Said the private secretary: “Everybody wants those wops executed, except people who don’t know how to spell their names.” He gave out the letter of the Reverend Llewellyn E. Darling, of Grace Evangelical Church of Everett, reporting that a vote had been taken among his Sunday congregation, and it was unanimous in demanding that the convicted men should die. “We believe,” wrote this Darling Reverend, “that the source of the petitions for their release is un-American and would eventually destroy the government of the United States.” Comrade Jesus, on his golden throne above, rose up and gave three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue.

XVI

Cornelia had put off visiting the State House; she would see what happened to others, and judge the best way of proceeding. Now she asked Henry Cabot Winters to arrange an interview; and he offered to go along--a notice to a politician that she was still a member of a great family, in spite of all her vagaries. The supersalesman would be polite to her, but also he would be grim, for she was a dangerous woman. He held her to blame for a great part of the publicity which this case had obtained; he had visions of her spending secretly the Thornwell millions in an effort to get her own perverse way.

Cornelia had never met him; he had been a name to her so far. Now she sat in his chamber and studied those eyes, so cold, expressionless--a curious thing, they made you think literally of agates. His face was round, his head partly bald, his costume immaculate, his smile as it were dead. He sat with his back to the window, so that in the matter of vision he had the advantage over his visitors. A large mahogany desk; a green blotter, with a few papers, a fancy bronze ink-stand, and a little state flag on a standard for patriotism. A large room, done in white, with large white doors and heavy carpet and a fireplace never used. “I guess you have seen all this many times, Mrs. Thornwell,” he said, respectfully.

Yes, Cornelia had seen it. “When I was a little girl, the old home of John Hancock stood out there in front.” So they talked “Boston,” and perhaps she would have done better if she had talked nothing else; her social prestige was really the only thing that stood any chance. In a chair at one side sat Mr. Joseph Wiggin, the Governor’s private counsel, a Harvard man and a blue-blood, smiling and quizzical; he would have conspired with her in that kind of enterprise, if she had put it up to him in the right, “old Boston” way. To charm an automobile salesman and persuade him to make a concession as a matter of social favor, the right of an aristocratic old lady to have her feelings spared!

Cornelia set out to tell about Vanzetti, and how well she knew him, and what a fine man he was. The Governor listened, but soon tired of it. “I haven’t the time to deal with backgrounds and psychology, Mrs. Thornwell.” She tried to show him what backgrounds and psychology meant. “Consider Nick. They tell us he went out and stole sixteen thousand dollars, and then came back to his shoe factory and earned thirty-seven dollars and eighty cents!” But she was rousing his male combativeness. “They had to go on working in the factory,” he argued. “They couldn’t have afforded to change their habits.”

Cornelia was studying the bland face and the strange expressionless eyes. What sort of man was this? What motives would sway him? A business man, of a simple type, used to facing simple problems, like those of price; the proper rental for a building, or wages for an employee, easy to decide; a man of action, not a thinker. Now he had to weigh the souls of idealists, he had to estimate social forces--and they were completely beyond his comprehension. “I am a plain man, Mrs. Thornwell, not an intellectual.” She had started to tell him about Bart’s studies, the books she had seen him mastering by patient toil in the night; but she realized that this was an affront to a merchant of motor-cars who had been studying markets and prices. Neither would it do any good to praise the unselfish motives of the two social rebels. That, too, would give offense to the man of money. “These men who don’t believe in private property must be depraved,” he had said.

She told him about the two trials, and what she had learned about the various prosecution witnesses. The Governor praised these latter; “clear-eyed,” was his word. Said the old lady, “Their eyes may be clear from the outside looking in, but assuredly they were not clear from the inside looking out.” She told the long story of the prevarications and waverings of these witnesses, as proved by the records of the preliminary hearings, and by the Pinkerton reports. The Governor knew of these reports now, but he did not know what was in them, and was puzzled by details. He did not even know the names of some witnesses. She spoke of Behrsin, and the Governor said, “Cursin, who is Cursin?”

But everything polite, according to good form; he heard her to the end, giving few signs of impatience. “I will give careful consideration to what you tell me, Mrs. Thornwell. I have great respect for your sincerity, and thank you for coming to see me.” Bows and smiles all round, a pleasant hour--and utterly, utterly futile.

“The case is completely indigestible to him, he can’t hold it in his mind.” Such was the judgment of Henry Cabot Winters, legal expert, as he walked with his mother-in-law down the long marble corridors. “You have to know a great deal about it in order to know anything, and Fuller doesn’t know anything.”

“What will he do, Henry?”

“He’ll take somebody’s word for it. He’ll think he is deciding, but his mind will make itself up without his realizing it. That’s the way he’s gone through life--landing on his feet like a cat. What I’m afraid is, he has landed already, and facing the wrong way.” As he said this, the great lawyer put his arm under the old lady’s, and held her steady as they walked towards his car. “It comes to this, Mother--what I said to Rupert last night: you can make a chauffeur out of a governor, but you can’t make a governor out of a chauffeur!”

XX. THE DECISION

On July twenty-ninth it was announced that the decision would be given out on the third of August. That was a Wednesday, the day the Governor’s council met; and this fact might have significance, because, if he were going to grant clemency, the council would have to assent. Shreds of evidence like that caused hope to rise in the balance. Rumors would come, one way or the other; the Governor had said this, he had asked that.

Joe Randall never wavered in his pessimism. “Fuller has no idea but death; he never has had it for an instant, and he never will.” But some of the other newspaper men thought differently; said one: “You can’t tell me that a man so happy would send two human beings to the chair!” Others had talked with members of the council, who told, in confidence, of definite statements the Governor had made. The New York Times correspondent sent his paper a detailed story to the effect that the Governor meant to postpone the execution, and ask the legislature to pass a special act providing for a new trial. The New York World had the same story; the Herald Tribune followed.

On the day before August third a peculiar development. Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States, was spending his summer vacation in the Rockies, catching trout with worms, and having himself photographed in ten-gallon hats and other moving picture appurtenances. He received the newspaper “boys” on his front porch and handed them a typewritten slip of paper reading, “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” This economical sentence caused a thrill in the bosoms of great numbers of public men; and enemies of Alvan T. Fuller imagined that it decided the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. Careful newspapers like the New York Times and World do not often let themselves be fooled as in this case--so these suspicious ones argued; something must have changed the mind of the supersalesman on the night of the second of August, causing him to give up the idea of clemency. Could it have been a vision of himself, following the footsteps of “Cautious Cal” up the political ladder; sweeping the next Republican convention in a storm of enthusiasm for another hero who had “crushed the Reds”?

Whether there was any truth in this wild guess, none could say, except Fuller himself. But this much is certain, he desperately wanted that nomination; and it is interesting to note what happened in the following year, when the Republican convention assembled. The name of Alvan T. Fuller was put before the little group of rich men’s agents who meet in a hotel room and determine nominations for president and vice-president. The Governor’s friends set forth the heroic deed that he had done, and the storm of fervor which this deed would rouse in the bosoms of all patriots. But the politicians of 1928 remarked coldly that this was not 1920. “The Republican party cannot afford to debate the Sacco-Vanzetti case from now until the end of the campaign!” There was not a single vote for the supersalesman; and so furious was he in his disappointment that he refused to let ex-Governor Cox of Massachusetts have the nomination in his place. To Senator Butler, over the long-distance telephone wire, he said: “It will be Fuller or nobody!”

August third, the day of the decision. The State House press room and Governor’s office were not big enough to hold the mob of reporters, and for the first time in Massachusetts history the legislative chamber was turned over to their use, and the press gallery equipped with telegraph wires. More than eighty men, like hunting-dogs held in leash, leaping and barking. The whole outside world was clamoring for every detail having to do with that scene.

The interest in the case had grown, until it was like nothing in history; great newspapers in New York, which had given several inches to the conviction of the men, were now giving pages to the struggle for a new trial.

Somehow the working classes of all nations had come to know about this case, and had made it their own. They were listening to fiery orators, taking part in parades, throwing bricks through American window glass, setting off bombs in front of embassies and legations. To the ruling class element of Massachusetts this was a proof of the worst they had been told about world Bolshevism; it was a diabolical conspiracy against the good name of the Commonwealth, and to meet it these righteous persons summoned the spirits of their Puritan ancestors, who had withstood persecution and torture at the hands of royal despots and their priestly monitors. The louder the clamor on behalf of the anarchists, the less chance that it would be heeded--so said the stiff-necked ones.

The Governor had not come to his office; rumor had it that he was working on his decision in an unnamed hotel. Over at the Sacco-Vanzetti headquarters in Hanover street, a couple of rooms in a dingy office building with time-worn floors, there were reporters and photographers, bootleggers and poets, Italian laborers and Harvard professors, seated on boxes, bundles of papers, tables and rickety chairs, waiting, waiting. On the walls were posters in many languages, calling for mass-meetings to save Sacco and Vanzetti; one in French, signed by cabinet ministers, referring to “Calvary,” which would have pleased Bart; one in German, saying “Justice is dead”; one from Mexico, saying “Freedom and Justice.” Bart was right--his name had come to have a meaning!

Cornelia Thornwell stayed in her apartment, and friends came in to keep the watch with her and divert her mind. But no one could talk about anything but the decision. Now and then the phone would ring, and her heart would jump so that it hurt; when it proved to be more delay, she would sink back in her chair, feeling faint. Creighton Hill, a young newspaperman who was heart and soul for the defense, came in to cheer her; the afternoon papers were full of hints of a reprieve; everybody was hopeful. Judge Webster Thayer was in Ogunquit, Maine, and at the Cliff Country Club that morning had made 18 holes in 84.

Waiting, waiting. Evening, and still the Governor had not come to his office. Crowds gathered at the State House, and were driven back. The decision would be late, said the secretary. Betty, who was at headquarters, phoned to her grand-mother--for the tenth time, trying to brace the tortured soul to meet the coming shock. “Joe says the brute is holding up the decision so that we won’t be able to get in any answer to-night. He wants the front page of the morning papers to himself!”

So it proved. At twenty minutes past eleven at night, the last moment when it would be possible to put the text of the decision into the main editions of the big newspapers, and when there was no longer a chance that any friend of the defense could prepare a reply, or find any distracted reporter able to listen to one--at that moment the Governor’s secretary appeared with a stack of envelopes, each containing seven mimeographed sheets. The reporters grabbed them, and tore them open as they ran. The word “Die” went by telegraph and cable to five continents, and in a few minutes there were “extras” on the streets in big cities, with streamer headlines across the front page: “Sacco and Vanzetti Doomed to Die”--“Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, Says Fuller”--“Sacco and Vanzetti Guilty, and Will Die.”

III

Wonderful, wonderful was the judicial system of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as portrayed in those seven mimeographed sheets! Throughout all this complicated and difficult case it had functioned without one single slip. The judge had been upright and impartial, the jury had been conscientious and fair, the witnesses--for the Commonwealth--had been clear-eyed and unafraid, the Supreme Judicial Court had been infallible. And now came the supersalesman of automobiles, and with his eagle eye he surveyed the procedure, seeking a flaw. Patiently he had studied every word of the record, the later appeals and decisions; he had interviewed jurors and witnesses, and made sure that everything was perfect; now he mounted the rostrum and told the civilized world about it, putting the final seal of completion upon the performance.

One after another he took some aspect of the case, and after mentioning the criticisms of it, disposed of them in one or two majestic and final sentences. First, the jury. “I find that the jurors were thoroughly honest men ... I can see no warrant for the assertion that the jury trial was unfair.” The fact that the elderly flag-saluting foreman of the jury had said, on his way to duty, “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!”--that was a detail so trivial that an enthusiastic supersalesman did not bother to report it.

And then “Web” Thayer. “Affidavits have been presented claiming that the judge was prejudiced. I see no evidence of prejudice in his conduct of the trial.” The eagle eye had inspected those passages in the record where “Web” had connived at the job of hiding from the jury the fact that Goodridge was an admitted thief; that had been fair. The eagle eye had seen “Web” butting in to discredit the witness Kurlansky, the shop-keeper who had failed to stop the district attorney and police from “framing” the testimony of Lola Andrews; that had been fair. “Web” had permitted the district attorney to browbeat Sacco for not knowing what was not true about Harvard College; that had been fair. “Web” had sneered seven times at the defense lawyers for claiming something which they hadn’t claimed; that, too, had been fair. He had let the district attorney tell the jury that Proctor had testified something that Proctor had in fact refused to testify, and that the district attorney knew he had refused to testify; that likewise had been fair. “Web” himself had told the jury the same thing; and that had been fairest of all.

And then the appeals for a new trial, based upon new evidence that had been found: evidence of the foreman’s prejudice and misconduct, of Goodridge’s criminal career and perjury upon the witness-stand; the retractions of Lola Andrews and Louis Pelzer; the confession of the head of the State Police that he had conspired with the district attorney’s office to misrepresent his testimony to the jury; the new evidence of Gould, Kelly and Kennedy, deliberately withheld from the defense. Said the supersalesman: “I have examined all of these motions and read the affidavits in support of them to see whether they presented any valid reason for granting the men a new trial. I am convinced that they do not.”

And the judge’s handling of these appeals and motions--that, too, had been complete and marvelous perfection! Everything that he had done--including his lying about the affidavits, and saying that they said what they didn’t say; his misrepresentation of Supreme Court decisions, his misquoting of testimony, his making up of passages which he said were in the testimony, but which were not in the testimony--all that had been perfect, and “Web’s” motives in doing these things had been as pure as the driven snow in Boston. Said the supersalesman: “I am further convinced that the presiding judge gave no evidence of bias in denying them all and refusing a new trial.”

The supersalesman pronounced Vanzetti guilty of the Bridgewater crime, and stressed the fact that he had failed to take the stand in his own behalf--although it was the perfect law of the perfect Commonwealth that he didn’t have to take the stand if he didn’t want to, and that his failure to do so was not to be used against him. The supersalesman was so sure that the men were guilty that he was not content to say it once, he said it twice about Sacco and three times about Vanzetti; he was so sure the trial was fair that he said it five times--and added for good measure: “The proceedings were without a flaw.” He put in an eloquent description of the South Braintree crime, with emphasis upon its brutality, which made fine melodrama for the newspapers; and then he wound up in a blaze of glory, putting himself in the center of the picture, with jury and witnesses about him. “I am proud to be associated in this public service with clear-eyed witnesses, unafraid to tell the truth, and with jurors who discharged their obligations in accordance with their convictions and their oaths.”

Ten or a dozen persons crowded into the little living-room of the apartment adjoining Cornelia’s, where lived Betty and Joe. The seven mimeographed pages had been read aloud, and passages read over again, and marked with exclamation points and question marks. Hours passed while the clamor and excitement continued. Nobody thought of sleep; impossible ever to sleep in the world again--let sleep be banished from Boston, as punishment for this atrocity! The language of some of the younger men and women was unfit for the older ones to hear; but the older ones realized that this was a special occasion, like nothing in Boston history. The air of the room became gray with tobacco smoke, and the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution was broken, along with the laws against blasphemy and sedition; for some radicals could not stand the strain of this ordeal, any more than could the conservatives, without help from Italian bootleggers.

Joe was at his typewriter, banging away, with a green shade over his eyes; preparing a story to be put on the wires for the early editions of afternoon papers. He was making copies for other newspaper men, hoping they would get this point and that. Now and then the company would interrupt him--to make sure he had got some other point. Over at defense headquarters was another indignation meeting, and there was telephoning, back and forth, exchanging ideas and information. Quotations had to be looked up in the record, and falsehoods nailed down.

How they hated the supersalesman of automobiles--and how they raged at the trick he had played upon them, whereby millions, yes, tens of millions of people would read that statement at their breakfast tables and on their way to work--and would not get the answer of the committee until hours later, and then only in fragmentary form, or not at all! The fingers of men and women trembled as they pointed out passages of especial treachery.

Cornelia Thornwell, old-fashioned and hopelessly out of date, had notions about the dignity and honor of the office which the great Josiah Quincy Thornwell had once filled. It seemed to her that a Governor of the Commonwealth, mounting the rostrum and addressing the civilized world on an issue involving the lives of two human beings--that such a Governor ought at least to tell the truth. “Wouldn’t you think he’d leave out errors that can be proved by the record?”

Said Betty, “I’d expect him to lie like Satan.”

They would fall upon the seven mimeographed sheets again. Look at this! Look at that! Look at what he put in about Madeiros! “I give no weight to the Madeiros confession. It is popularly supposed he confessed to committing this crime.” What did the man mean by that sentence? He didn’t explain it--he went on to state his reasons for distrusting Madeiros, but not a word about what was “popularly supposed”! The words could only mean that the popular impression was mistaken, Madeiros had not “confessed to committing this crime.” Every reader would get that meaning, and no other meaning. The actual words written by Madeiros had been: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”

Then, an even shrewder trick--a little masterpiece of treachery, as cunningly contrived as the Proctor evasion, and Katzmann’s bogus answer to it, and “Web” Thayer’s obfuscations of both! The supersalesman summed up Sacco’s alibi--that he “claimed to have been at the Italian consulate in Boston on that date but the only confirmation of this claim is the memory of a former employee of the consulate who made a deposition in Italy,” etc. Study that sentence, all forgers, traducers and betrayers of all future time, and learn how to smile and be a villain still! The art of falsifying while seeming to tell the truth has never been carried to a higher stage--not in any form of supersalesmanship yet devised in the great empire of superproduction, or taught in the Graduate School of Business Administration of Harvard University.

Strictly and literally, it was the truth that Sacco had produced only one witness to testify that he had been “at the Italian Consulate in Boston on that date.” But Sacco had produced five other witnesses who testified that he had been in Boston on that date! Affe, the grocer, had testified that Sacco had paid him a bill, and Affe had produced on the stand a notebook with a memorandum of the payment, showing the date. Bosco and Guadagni, the editors, had testified to lunching with Sacco in Boni’s restaurant on that day, and Dentamaro, department manager of a bank, and Williams, an advertising agent, had testified to joining the group and chatting. Still more to the point, several of these witnesses had testified that Sacco, in the course of the talk, had told them the purpose for which he was in Boston, to visit the consulate and get his passports! Oh, treachery and double-dealing beyond all imagining--first, the Lowell commission hushing Bosco and Guadagni to silence, and doctoring the record of the proceedings in order to keep the story from the public; and then the mighty super salesman, stepping onto the rostrum and addressing the whole civilized world, telling it that Bosco and Guadagni did not exist!

Cornelia lay in bed, a reaction from the long strain. The Negro maid brought her coffee and toast, but she could not eat; she lay like one dead. It was all over for her; she had done all she could, struggled all she could--so she told herself. The young people might go on, Joe might write newspaper stories, trying to rouse a heedless public; Betty might organize mass meetings and speeches on the Common, but the runaway grandmother’s race was run.

She had to lie there and bring herself to face the thought of the electric chair. Through all these seven dreadful years, she had refused to face it--a game of self-deception; but Bart and Nick had been right all along--they had known that the thought must be faced, and they had done it. They had the will, and the philosophy; they had been able to talk about it and joke. Now Cornelia must do the same thing. Remember what somebody had told her--it does not hurt, because the current destroys the brain before there is time for a sensation. And when it is over, it is really over; other persons may worry for you, but you don’t worry for yourself. Also, you are a martyr, you have accomplished something for the cause you love.

That was what she must manage to realize. Persuade herself that there was a new generation coming, that would care where this one was indifferent; that would count it as something important that two wops had denied themselves happiness so that justice might be born into the world! Think about those young persons of the future; lie here and shut your eyes, and let them come into your presence and speak to you; feel their gentle hands upon your forehead, bidding you to rest, your tense nerves to relax and your heart to stop pounding.

Cornelia lay wrestling thus; and into her mind came drifting words of comfort. “Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph.” Vanzetti speaking; where had she heard him say those words? On a chair by her bedside was a scrap-book, full of letters, manuscripts, clippings. She was moved to sit up and turn the pages; here it was. Shortly after Judge Thayer had sentenced the two men to die, Cornelia had persuaded a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance to go to Dedham with her, and see what kind of men these alleged bandits were. Now, reading the interview, Cornelia recalled every detail of the scene; the prisoners coming down from their tier of cells, getting a glimpse of sunshine in the central hall, and lighting up with it--Nick, with his “kid’s” grin, Bart with his mature and gentle smile. The reporter, Phil D. Stong, a big fellow, rather blond German face, well-fed and well-groomed--on an expense account, as he told Cornelia, with a laugh; tender-hearted, with the sentimentality of his race--and struck dumb by the discovery of two men of this transparent sincerity and fine idealism in the shadow of the electric chair, face to face with their last enemy and not afraid of him. He had listened, while the victims did the talking; then he had gone away and tried to make a picture of the scene for the readers of a chain of newspapers.

“Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face. Tears touch the young man ‘Nick’s’ eyes for a moment, brightly, but his voice is steady. He is married to a sweet-faced little Italian woman. They have two children.

“In a moment, Nick, with his smooth pompadour, and his boy’s face, is laughing with the deputy sheriff in argument about prison fare.

“Vanzetti regards one kindly, but appraisingly. A ferocious mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence has made an anchorite.”

And then a glimpse of prison life:

“Up from the shops comes a file of gray men, arms folded, faces expressionless--a rhythm of steps and faces.

“‘They been working.’ Sacco’s fingers move nervously. ‘God, when I cannot work I almost go crazy. My fingers used to be busy. I beg, I argue--give me something to do--I shovel coal, anything. At last, they give me brick to clean--after three years. You see me now? I gain a pound a day for thirty days.’ The deputy sheriff nods confirmation.

“‘First they give me basket to weave, like children. Better than nothing, but not much. Then I sit alone--seven years--thousands of days--and all for say man’s nature can be perfect--day after day--nothing do--breathe, eat, sit up, lie down--because I think man innerly noble--not beast--’

“Vanzetti interrupts his companion gently. He knows the two visitors believe in the enforced regulations which restrain fallible humanity.

“‘We’re capitalists,’ he says smiling, and pointing to the line of workers. (Men under sentence of death are given no work.) ‘We have home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re non-producers--live off other man’s work. When libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.’

“Sacco gurgles with amusement. The deputy sheriff appears significantly. Suddenly one realizes that these men are to die in a straight wooden chair, just as the world begins its summer holidays.

“Nick and Vanzetti see the new expression and understand. They smile, gravely, sympathetically, as men smile at a child’s troubles.

“‘If it had not been for these thing,’ says Vanzetti, ‘I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s onderstanding of man, as now we do by an accident.

“‘Our words--our lives--our pains--nothing! The taking of our lives--lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler--all! That last moment belong to us--that agony is our triumph!’

“Not declaimed, just said simply.”

There were tears in Cornelia’s eyes as she finished. “Oh, beautiful! Beautiful!” And when Joe came in, later in the day, she showed him the clipping. “Those are marvelous words--those two paragraphs at the end. I wonder if you couldn’t quote them again, and get people to read them.”

Joe said that he would try it. In order to give a touch of drama, he put a headline: “Vanzetti to his Judges.” The two paragraphs were taken up and reproduced in labor papers, and became, as it were, a spiritual testament of Vanzetti, an untheological prayer which his friends carried about with them, and read while he was dying, and afterwards. Because of the title, people assumed that the words had been a part of a speech in court; but this was not so, they were spoken, quite simply and casually, to a newspaper reporter, the every-day stuff of Vanzetti’s mind.

History records that those who heard the Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln were ill pleased by it. They found it brief and inadequate, and gave all their praise to the flowery discourse of the great Edward Everett of Boston. But the future seldom chooses words which are flowery; it chooses those which have been wrung from the human heart in moments of great suffering, and which convey a gleam of spiritual illumination. When such words have been spoken, we discover what Paul meant when he wrote, “this mortal shall put on immortality.” School children learn them by heart, and libraries are written to interpret them; they are graven upon marble and cast in bronze; armies carry them on banners, temples arise to glorify them, and civilizations are built in their image.

Pass on, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, your work is done! You have fought the good fight, you have finished the race! Fear not the executioner, nor yet the raging slanderer--they are powerless to harm you, for you have carried out your life-purposes--including that incidental one of becoming a great master of English prose! You have spoken the noblest words heard in America in the two generations since Abraham Lincoln died! You have achieved what is called the “grand manner,” so rare in literature! That simplicity whereby men become as little children, and enter into the kingdom of heaven; that dignity which causes the critics to bow their haughty heads; that tenderness which touches the heart, that rapture which fires it, that sublimity which brings men to their knees!

In short, old Bart, you have brought the Commonwealth of Massachusetts back into the literary world again! After many years, New England has another great writer--for a short while only, until it has sent two thousand volts of electricity through his brain! What an odd freak of history, that this great one should be a despised wop! That, after all the millions spent upon education, he should not be a graduate of a college, nor even of a high school! That he should not even be able to spell correctly, nor to pronounce correctly, the language of which he is to be the glory!

What a satire upon great endowments, the huge masses of steel and stone, the deans and professors of this and that long-winded subject! As a result of their labors, there are a million persons in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who understand the correct use of past participles, and would not say, “I might have live”; yet there is not a single one of these millions who can speak a sentence that stands a chance of living! There are ten thousand graduates of Harvard College, every one of whom knows better than to say “onderstand” or “joostice”; yet there is only a handful who understand justice, and not one who will die for it!

VII

The fears of the defense, that they could not get their answer before the public, proved to be groundless. In truth, no answer was needed--the weaknesses of the Governor’s statement were so apparent. Impossible to take the lives of two men upon the basis of such an argument! There was a cry of dismay, so shrill that it penetrated even to the sanctum of supersalesmanship. A sudden panic among the “State House gang”; something must be done, and done quickly. The academic autocrats were summoned to the defense of their Governor, and three days later there appeared what was called the “report” of Lowell, Grant, and Stratton to the Governor.

It was much longer than the earlier document, and in its heavy style bore the marks of having been composed by President Lowell. It was argumentative where Fuller’s had been assertive; it was fumbling where his had been jaunty. The feebleness and confusion of its arguments suggested the operation of aged minds. To disinterested persons, the most striking fact was that the report could be judged without knowing anything about the case. The elderly gentlemen had managed to make their ineffectiveness evident in almost every paragraph.

Suppose, for example, that you picked up your morning paper, and read what the Commission had to say about the evidence of Roy Gould, the man who had got a bullet hole through his overcoat. “He certainly had an unusually good position to observe the men in the car, but on the other hand his evidence is merely cumulative.” What would you make out of that? Assuming that you knew the meaning of the word “cumulative,” why was evidence less valid because it was that? Wasn’t it the nature of good evidence to be cumulative, and didn’t you try to make it as cumulative as possible? Try some other word in that sentence: “his evidence is merely convincing” or, “his evidence is merely conclusive”!

Then that amazing and incredible sentence, in which the three elderly Brahmins summed up their meditations on the subject of one of their victims: “On the whole, we are of the opinion that Vanzetti was guilty of murder beyond reasonable doubt.” What did the three elderly Brahmins mean by a man’s being guilty “on the whole”? Or by their being of the opinion “on the whole”? Did they mean that there was some part of them which was not of the opinion? Or did they mean that there was some part of Vanzetti which was not guilty? On the Saturday when this report was given out, the New York Times made an effort to elucidate this question; and the New York Times is an important newspaper, whose queries are apt to be heeded, even by blue-blood college presidents. But apparently the Commission on the whole had decided on the whole that it would be safer on the whole to take no chances on the whole. The New York Times recorded that “efforts to reach members of the committee to clear up the exact meaning of ‘on the whole’ were unavailing.”

But imagine the scorn and fury of young radicals--reading that sentence, and not waiting to have the exact meaning cleared up! Said Mistress Betty, now become ferocious: “Is he going to execute Bart on the whole, or is he going to execute him completely?” She pictured the august President of Harvard University appearing before the Judgment Throne, and being informed that he was to be sent to hell on the whole, and roasted for eternity on the whole!

VIII

The three elderly blue-bloods had had a comparatively simple task laid out for them; they had been asked to decide whether Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial. Was it owing to their age, or to their inexperience with criminal matters, or to their overwhelming prejudice, that they had been unable to stick to their task, but must keep confusing it with the question whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty? The latter they could not possibly determine; they had neither the time, nor the facilities, nor the training, nor the temperament. But their self-assurance was such that they attempted it; with the result that they fell to guessing, like everybody else, and they were so naïve as to reveal this to a horrified world.

Thus, in declining to accept the story of Madeiros, they remarked: “If he were tried, his own confession, if wholly believed, would not be sufficient for a verdict of murder in the first degree.” Just what was the significance of that? Were the old gentlemen suggesting that two birds in the hand were better than one in the bush? And then, their extraordinary statement, that the evidence of Gould was “balanced” by that of Tootsie Toodles! Joe Randall said that such “balancing” ought to be exhibited on the vaudeville stage.

The handling of the Proctor confession had come to be a test of the honesty of official persons in Massachusetts; and it proved that each new person would find some new method of dodging the truth. The three elderly blue-bloods showed themselves fully as cunning as their predecessors. Said they: “Counsel for the defendants claim that the form of the question and the answer was devised to mislead the jury.” That was a fact; and it was an instance of how to lie while stating a fact. Counsel “claimed” it; but why put the burden of the “claim” onto counsel, when counsel were merely restating the confession of Proctor? And then to go on and say: “But it must be assumed that the jury understood the meaning of plain English words.” These learned Boston gentlemen claiming that Proctor had used “plain English words,” when Proctor himself had stated that he had used obscure English words, and for the purpose of confusing the jury! Let the common sense of mankind judge whether a jury of mechanics and working people would find no obscurity in the statement that the mortal bullet was consistent with having been fired by the Sacco pistol! And when both the district attorney and the judge had pretended to misunderstand it, and had told them that it meant what it did not mean!

And then to be nasty, and hint that their own high police official, who had served them faithfully for forty years, and now was dead and unable to defend himself, had made his confession because the district attorney had refused to pay him five hundred dollars for his expert testimony!

To Cornelia Thornwell this report meant the end of all things; her joy in life was gone. For prejudice and trickery on the part of a motor-car salesman she could make snobbish allowances; but in the case of A. Lawrence Lowell no such recourse was available, he was her kind of person, the best she had to offer. For years she had gone to commencements, and listened to his ponderous wisdom, and thought he was a great man; and here in a test she discovered that he had listened to all the gossip, and swallowed the whole “theory”!

She knew what would happen, if she went out among her friends to argue against this report. The friends would gaze at her in dismay. “But, my dear, Mr. Lowell says they are guilty!” If she persisted, the friends would add, “But my dear, Mr. Lowell investigated the case! He gave more than half his vacation to it!” Those who knew her well, including the members of the family, would say, “But Mother, you wanted Mr. Lowell, and now you won’t abide by what he says!”

Impossible to make headway against such a tide! In New York men could read that report, and judge it for what it was, a revelation of the mental breakdown of a once-great civilization; but in Boston hardly any one could judge it, Mr. Lowell did the thinking of half the city. He was a god, and had descended from his throne, and devoted his mighty intellect to the affairs of two obscure wops; now for these wops and their supporters to refuse to accept his verdict was not merely blasphemy, it was ingratitude and impertinence.

William G. Thompson withdrew from the case. One more lawyer had failed; one more lawyer had made enemies, and thought it would help Sacco and Vanzetti if he took himself out of the way. But each time it was made clear that the cause of the hatred was Sacco and Vanzetti, no one else; the new lawyer, whoever he might be, would be as much hated as the old one.

They took Cornelia’s advice, and went to the old stock, and retained Mr. Arthur Dehon Hill. Silver hair and rosy cheeks and a manner of complete assurance, he should have been Arthur Beacon Hill, according to Joe Randall. He was so correct that he dared to make jokes about it. Real “Old Boston,” he thought that every criminal, even an anarchist, was entitled to a fair trial, and to have a lawyer do the best for him that the legal game allowed. But to his surprise he discovered that a great many persons, even lawyers, were strongly disapproving of his conduct in defending these enemies of society.

He started work on Saturday, the sixth of August; and on the night of Wednesday, the tenth, his clients were due to die: rather a short time-limit for the mastering of a complicated case! He began with an appeal to the Governor to extend the time; and the Governor replied by silence. He filed notice of an appeal to Judge Thayer for a new trial, on the basis of newly discovered evidence, and also--delightful inspiration!--on the ground that Sacco and Vanzetti had not had a fair trial, because the trial judge had been prejudiced! Judge Thayer agreed to give up making golf-scores in Ogunquit, Maine, and appear in Dedham Court House on Monday morning, to judge whether Judge Thayer had been prejudiced against Sacco and Vanzetti!

Also Mr. Hill started an appeal before Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court, to try to get another motion before the full bench of that Court. Some jumping about for one lawyer, especially when all the courts closed at noon on Saturday. Elias Field was helping, and also Michael Angelo Musmanno, a young lawyer who had been sent on from Pittsburgh by some Italian societies. A naïve and warm-hearted person, Catholic and conservative, he had fallen in love with an anarchist infidel and an anarchist atheist, and was bewildered by the hatred which unloving Boston felt for his clients. A hectic three weeks the young lawyer spent chasing about New England and Canada, in motor cars, and now and then in airplanes, hunting supreme court judges on vacation.

Other lawyers giving advice, some of them secretly. One was Henry Cabot Winters--hush, not a word! He would call Cornelia on the phone. “Mother, I don’t want to get mixed up in this, but you’d better tell those fellows not to overlook saving all their exceptions as basis of a writ of certiorari to the Federal courts; and tell Hill not to let ‘Web’ get a single point on him--challenge his right to hear a word, or decide any issue, on the basis that it is a prejudiced decision. And when you go to a Federal judge, don’t overlook Moore v. Dempsey 261 U.S. 86.” Cornelia would have to say, “Wait! Wait! Let me get that down!” She had been wrestling with the powers that ruled her Commonwealth for seven years, but she had not yet learned to have a pencil and pad at the telephone.

Also professors of the Harvard Law School helping--and no secret about that, but on the contrary, picturesque scandals for the Hearst newspapers! A war between the law school and rest of the university, between Frankfurter and Lowell! Lowell had been disapproving of Jews as professors, ever since eight years ago, when another of them, Laski, had made a speech to the wives of striking policemen, while Lowell was preparing to lend the students of his university for strikebreakers. Now here was Frankfurter defending two anarchists in a book, while Lowell was sentencing the incendiary pair to death.

A pretty fight, difficult to keep within the limits of academic propriety! Not so long ago, the great Lowell had dealt a strong punch to the Jewish jaw, in the shape of a program to limit the percentage of such students allowed in Harvard; he proposed to do it openly, instead of secretly, as the custom was. He gave his reasons--among them that one hundred per cent of the books stolen from the university library were stolen by Jews. When this statement was investigated, the evidence turned out to be that one Jewish student had one library book which he had forgotten.

And now here were the Harvard alumni, rallying to the aid of their blue-blood president, by refusing to contribute to the law school endowment, so long as Felix Frankfurter remained a professor; they were making a regular campaign out of this. Among those who had publicly joined it was Mr. Ranney, the new assistant district attorney from Norfolk County, who had been opposing the Sacco-Vanzetti defense before the Governor; also that blandly smiling blue-blood lawyer, Mr. Joseph Wiggin, who had been the Governor’s private counsel, present at all hearings. “You see what kind of advice Fuller is getting!” said Henry Cabot Winters.

Disputes at headquarters of the Sacco-Vanzetti committee; factions clashing, radicals jeering at conservatives. “Now you see! You obeyed your respectable lawyers! You were good, and didn’t make any noise, you trusted to legal precedents--and where have you got? If you had listened to us, if you had spent the money to make an appeal to labor, we could have had a general strike now, and the boys would have been saved!” But even now the conservatives wouldn’t agree. Mrs. Evans thought it necessary to bow to the Governor’s decision; while the communists wanted to make a mass appeal for a strike all over the country. Impossible to decide on a single move; and meantime the clock was ticking away the minutes and hours of the victims’ lives!

Those who believed in picketing and street demonstrations proceeded to organize and send out a call for martyrs. On Sunday afternoon there were to be mass meetings on the Common; the socialists and the communists each had a “tree,” and as usual, they announced rival meetings. Superintendent of Police Michael J. Crowley announced that he would attend both. For the first time in Boston history the entire police force of twenty-two hundred men were on what was known as “twenty-four hour duty.” All vacations were canceled, extra men were brought from other cities, the firemen were sworn in as deputies, the state constabulary were ready with armored cars, riot guns, searchlights and gas bombs. Said the sharp-tongued Betty, “The Commonwealth has told ten thousand lies, and each lie must have a club and a gun to protect it!”

Between Boston Common and the park known as the Public Gardens there extends a wide esplanade, half a mile long, lined with old elm trees; since as far back in history as the oldest citizen’s great-grandfather could remember, this had been the temple of Boston’s free speech. The trees were numbered, and every Sunday afternoon the advocates of anything would have a tree assigned to them, where they might set up a soap box and stand thereon, and say what they pleased to all who cared to listen--with only such interference as came from the voices of the orators under the other trees.

But now the government of Massachusetts had officially endorsed ten thousand lies, and staked its official existence upon them; the one thing it could not stand was to have these lies exposed to the general gaze. Under the socialist tree were women carrying banners, containing the sentence once spoken by the just and upright and utterly unprejudiced Mr. Justice Thayer. He was to speak again from the bench to-morrow morning, and tell all the world how just and upright and utterly unprejudiced he was. Now here was a banner: “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” The makers of the banner had left the bad word blank, but that did not improve matters, because there is no limit to what the human imagination may insert in a blank. People might imagine the worst of all possible expressions, so bad that it had never been printed in any newspaper. If they did imagine that, they would be right; and so it was necessary for the Commonwealth to resort to clubs and bullets.

Alfred Baker Lewis, devoted young secretary of the Socialist Party, was denouncing the Governor’s decision, when Michael J. Crowley came pushing his way through the crowd, demanding to see his permit. Burly Irish-Catholic Mike, known as “Mickey the Gunman” to the striking policemen, and called even worse names by the booksellers of Boston, whose boss and master he was. For among the many duties of a superintendent of police in that pious city is to supervise the books which the literati may purchase. In the course of the past two years Mike had barred some seventy of the leading novels of the day, practically everything which an intelligent man or woman would want to read.

And so to-day; the public would be forbidden to hear every word that could interest an intelligent citizen. The Salvation Army would go on banging its drum, and the Holy Rollers would continue their contortions; but protest against legalized murder would be met with clubs, and if necessary with bullets.

“Let me see your permit,” commanded the superintendent of police; and when the orator produced it, Mike announced, “This permit is canceled and the meeting is forbidden.” When the young socialist attempted to protest, “You are not going to argue this case in public,” said the majestic Mike--just that and no more; he said it several times, so that every citizen of Boston might feel the full weight of the civic insult. “You are not going to argue this case in public!” Only in the council chamber at the State House, before elderly academic autocrats who would doctor the record when they got through, and keep the public from knowing what blunders they had made!

“This meeting will disperse!” shouted Mike, to the sixteen thousand persons crowded round him; and the blue-clad “cops” began their onslaught--“for every lie a club or a bullet!”

“Come over to our tree! We have a permit!” shouted the communists; so the crowd swarmed over there and Mike came also, and repeated his performance, confiscating another permit. But the communist was not so obedient as the socialist--he went on trying to speak, and was hauled off the soap box and surrounded by policemen, and dragged off to the waiting patrol-wagon. Three other persons they arrested--one of them Edward Holton James, of Concord, nephew of the novelist who wrote like a psychologist and of the psychologist who wrote like a novelist.

A persistent person, Mr. James; perhaps it came from living in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s back-yard. He had stood up in Germany, during the war, and said what he thought about the Kaiser. The Germans, not understanding Concord, had decided that he must be insane, so they had shipped him into Holland; whereupon he had promptly got himself smuggled back in a load of merchandise, and stood up again and said what he thought about the Kaiser, and spent three years in a fortress for it.

Now he was so naïve as to think that he owned a share of the Common, and had a right to speak there, and to refuse to be dragged off. He resisted being dragged, and went so far as to slap one of the officers--with the flat of his hand. They taught him his lesson, regardless of his blue-blood and his money; when the “cop” got him alone in the cell he gave him one on the side of the jaw, and Mr. James “passed out,” as the saying is, and when he came to he had a cracked jawbone, to keep him quiet for a while.

XII

Arthur Dehon Hill arguing before Judge Thayer in Dedham Court-house, with the round white dome and portholes like an ocean liner. Silver hair and rosy cheeks, his manner of subtle banter now replaced by burning indignation, that a judge with such a record as Web’s, and knowing in his heart such prejudice as Web’s, should be insisting upon deciding a motion involving two human lives. The lawyer invited the judge to consider how he would feel if the followers of Lenin had seized the government of Massachusetts, and were trying him according to the precedents he had set! He told Web to his face that he had been unfit to try the case from the beginning; he cited in open court what the Lowell commission had said about him--that in talking about the case off the bench he had committed “a grave breach of official decorum.” Could any man hear such words about himself, and not be affected by them? Web’s answer was that the chief justice of the Superior Court had instructed him to cut short his vacation and hear this motion. “And I am here,” said Web, in a low voice. His face was gray, his hands trembling, his eyes blinking fast. His court-house was well guarded that day.

New evidence had been discovered. A young fellow by the name of Candido di Bona had been standing on the street in South Braintree when the bandit-car went by, and now made affidavit that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti was in that car. This evidence was what the Lowell Commission would have called “merely cumulative”; there were already thirty-one persons who had made such statements, either at the trial or in later affidavits, and Web Thayer knew of them all, and intended to pay no more heed to the thirty-second than he had paid to the thirty-first. He thought that he no longer had jurisdiction; that after sentence had been passed, no judge of the Superior Court could entertain any motion. To this the lawyer argued vehemently that nothing could deprive accused men of an elemental right. “I believe that if there is new and important evidence, the courts have the power to consider it, even after sentence has been pronounced--even down to the time the men are strapped in the electric chair. I do not believe the laws intended the courts to regard these men as legally dead as soon as sentence was pronounced.”

Arthur K. Reading, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, had been instructed by the Governor to follow Mr. Hill in his peregrinations among the courts and make certain that he didn’t get anything. Handsome, genial, and a good fellow, Mr. Reading was a bitter foe of all Reds, and the aiders and abettors of Reds. Said he: “I have just heard the most preposterous argument that I have ever heard from an able lawyer.” He expressed his horror at “this attack on the court for which I have the highest regard.” He proclaimed that, “Ours is a government of laws.” Such reverence for laws and courts this noble gentleman had--and even while he was orating, his pockets were stuffed full of money, collected from various organizations which had been warned by Arthur K. Reading as counsel that they were in danger of prosecution by Arthur K. Reading as attorney general!

The “Decimo Club” was an ingenious organization which sold memberships to persons who hoped to get rich quickly; but the only ones who did get rich were the promoters of the club, and their legal counsel. A couple of months ago they had secretly handed a check for twenty-five thousand dollars to Mr. Reading, and immediately thereafter he had given to the newspaper reporters an interview telling them that the Decimo Club was all right. He had performed similar “legal services” for the “L.A.W.,” an automobile stock-selling scheme with curiously involved features. Altogether he had collected about ninety thousand dollars in such “fees,” and within ten months of the time that he had demanded the life of Sacco and Vanzetti, he was to be formally indicted by the House of Representatives and driven from his high office in disgrace--the first time that had happened in the history of the Commonwealth. So nemesis waits for Red-hunters!

XIII

In the meantime Cornelia Thornwell had got into action again--impossible to rest. Pleading with the Governor to grant a respite--but the Governor would not give a hint of his intentions. Calling up friends and relatives, nagging at them to “do something”--when they had no idea what to do. “Henry, do you suppose Fuller can really intend to let those boys die while proceedings are pending before the courts?”

“I’m afraid he does, Mother”--this over the telephone.

“But what can be in his mind?”

“Well, Mother, it is costing a lot of money to keep this thing going. Think of the military expenses! And then, it’s bad advertising; every day it keeps up, things look worse for Fuller and Lowell, and naturally they want it over with.”

“Do they think they can stop it by a murder?”

“I’m afraid they do, Mother--and what’s more, I’m afraid they are right. You can’t keep the case alive when the men are dead.”

“Henry, you must do something for me!”

“But what can I do? I have no pull with Fuller, I don’t even drive a Packard car.” The great lawyer thought for a bit, and added: “Why don’t you try a little social pressure? Get Deborah or Alice or both of them to give him and his lady a dinner-party? I’ll come, if it will do any good.”

Learn how the world is governed, Cornelia--now in your seventy-third year of life! Once upon a time people did things like this to you, and you were too gentle and trusting, too much of a “lady” to know it, or to believe it when it was pointed out to you. But now do it yourself! Seek out the weak spot in the armor of a motor-car salesman who has forty million dollars, but no “social position,” and has a Catholic wife, a cruel handicap in Massachusetts! Get busy at the telephone, and put it up to your daughters, as hard as you know how--if they have one particle of love for you in their hearts, if ever they had a particle of love in their hearts, to spare you this dreadful anguish!

True it is that the motor-car salesman has made public attacks on Rupert Alvin, calling him an arch-corruptionist and things like that; but that is just politics, and social life is another thing altogether. The motor-car salesman will doubtless know what is being done to him; he is a business man, and does not give something for nothing, nor expect to get something for nothing. To be received in one of the greatest homes in New England, to put his feet under the table with haughty and unapproachable Brahmins--that counts for nothing to him personally, or so he pretends, being “bull-headed” and defiant; but he has a wife, and children growing up to the age of marriage, and what the women and children clamor for cannot be overlooked by the most self-satisfied of self-made millionaires.

Cornelia had her way. Ladies do in Boston, when they are persistent, and when they are old. The formal invitation was written by Deborah Alvin, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and delivered by a chauffeur at the Governor’s summer home, at Rye Beach in New Hampshire. A couple of hours later an automobile arrived at the North Shore palace of the Rupert Alvins, with a formally written acceptance. Deborah got busy, and invited half a dozen members of the family, and intimate friends who could be taken into the secret. Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge came--another stage in her feminist revolt! Alice Thornwell Winters came, dressed in pale lavender, the color which harmonized with her aura; having lost a great deal of weight on a humming-bird diet, she had taken up a new rôle, and was a picture of delicate and spiritualized melancholy.

The Governor and his lady arrived, in the very latest model of Packard limousine, custom-built, preceded by a car full of alert-looking men with bulging hip-pockets, and followed by another carload. Several posted themselves at the front door, others walked round and round the house and peered into bushes and under porches. One, who looked and acted like a guest, wandered about the downstairs rooms all through the meal; the Commonwealth was taking no chances--especially in a home where the mother-in-law was one of the most notorious Reds. These precautions lent an extra thrill to the meal, but good form required that no one should know anything about them.

The supersalesman sat at the right of his hostess; on the other side was Alice, and the matter-of-fact and rosy gentleman had never encountered anything so much like heaven. She told him about his aura, which was news to him; Deborah told him about her orphan asylum, and Rupert told about his chapel, and how a bishop from England had praised the design of the apse. Never a word about the distressing news which was on the front pages of all the papers! “Cura nulla medicabilis arte” may have been all right for a poet two thousand years ago, but the social arts of “old Boston” had mastered all human weakness.

Except that at the end of a delightful evening Deborah led her distinguished guest to one side, and burdened him for a moment with the story of how her old mother was suffering so that they feared for her life; would she be presuming if she asked the Governor to reprieve the two wretched men for a couple of weeks, until the hope of court action could be tried out? The supersalesman replied with all the caution of a skilled politician. It would not do for him to say outright, because the final decision rested with his Council. But privately, and in strictest confidence, he would assure Mrs. Alvin of his best endeavors, and she might convey that information to her mother under a seal of secrecy. When the ordeal was over, and Cornelia was free to tell the story to Betty and Joe, she commented upon the way the world is governed. Said Betty: “Don’t you know, Grannie, the real cause of the world war--that King Edward of England was not sufficiently polite to his nephew, Emperor William of Germany?”

XIV

On Monday evening Judge Webster Thayer handed down a decision, to the effect that he had no jurisdiction to entertain any motion in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. By this ruling he claimed to have avoided passing upon his own prejudice; but at the same time he said, in open court, “I had no prejudice.” He said it many times.

On Tuesday morning he gave another decision, refusing the request for a revocation and stay of sentence. He gave this out from his home in Worcester, where two police officers watched by day and two by night, and one followed behind the judge when he went walking with his dog. In the toilet of a subway station in New York, a bomb had exploded, wrecking the station and seriously injuring two persons. The friends of law and order were certain that the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti had set this bomb; while the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti were equally certain that their worst enemies had done it. In the State House in Boston a package had been found in one of the elevators; after listening for clockwork inside, and hearing nothing, the police had opened it with many precautions, and found two pounds of chocolate.

Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court declared that he had no power to grant a motion for a new trial; it was a problem how to bring the matter before the Full Court. Federal Judge Anderson declined to intervene--in spite of “Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86.” In fact he thought that decision worked the other way. A difficult matter to make a science out of the law, when no one could determine what it meant, and there were no angels to administer it! Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court said that he had no authority, but pointed out that they were at liberty to try some judge of the circuit court; however, the judges of the circuit court advised trying the supreme court. It was as Bart had noted long ago--everybody put the problem off on somebody else!

Hill and Field and Musmanno went racing about from one court to another, and from one summer resort to another--wherever a judge might be intercepted. Behind them chased Attorney General Reading, his pockets full of money from the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.”; and behind him one or more carloads of reporters, liberally provided with funds by large-scale purveyors of sensation. Hill made another appeal to the Governor for a stay; and the Governor announced that he would not grant the request. That was Tuesday afternoon, and the execution was set for Wednesday midnight.

“What does that mean, Deborah?”--it was Cornelia phoning to her daughter, tormented with anxiety.

“I don’t know, Mother. I only know what he told me. He may have his reasons. We ought not to talk about it over the telephone.” So there was nothing to do but wait, and guess at the tortuous motives of a supersalesman of automobiles, whose heart was set upon moving to the White House.

Betty and Joe were absorbed in frantic efforts to awaken public opinion. The respectable lawyers were out of favor now, and it was permitted to make “propaganda.” The committee had issued a call for a hundred thousand persons to come to Boston and voice the protest of America against judicial murder. About two hundred came. For the most part they only added to the confusion, because there was no one to organize them or put them to work. No two had the same idea of what should be done; and when they came to the committee, they found exactly the same state of disagreement.

Many of the group from New York, especially the liberals and the lawyers, thought that the crucial issue was the Department of Justice files. They started a clamor: “Open the files!” Several newspapers took it up. But this program met with strong opposition from the Italian anarchists. Could there be things in these files which Italian anarchists did not want to see upon the front pages of newspapers? The liberals got so far as to induce the Department of Justice to say that the files would be turned over to Governor Fuller or to President Lowell, if either would ask for them; but these worthies took exactly the same attitude as the anarchists, and for exactly the same reason. There were more things in the class struggle than were dreamed of in the philosophy of amiable liberals.

One thing all sympathizers could do, and that was to get arrested. Over at socialist headquarters in Essex Street was a little group which had a program, and an organization to carry it out. A group of students came there, and placards and sandwich signs were made, calling upon Governor Fuller for justice. Young men and women sallied forth--and as they emerged from the building, a squad of police fell upon them, and took away the signs and tore them to pieces. So the job had to be done all over; the signs were prepared secretly, and would-be paraders came one by one to the place of demonstration, hiding their signs until they were on the picket-line.

On Tuesday afternoon some thirty paraders made their appearance in front of the State House, each wearing a placard with a Sacco-Vanzetti argument upon it. For a while the police let them alone, and contented themselves with keeping the crowd on the other side of the street. On the Beacon Street front of the State House there is an iron picket-fence, which curves in towards the main entrance, making a large half moon; so there was a comfortable space for paraders, and a chance for their sentiments to be legible. They walked in silence, keeping in motion, paying no attention to any one: a form of demonstration which had first been used on Broadway, New York, during the Colorado coal strike, and had been taken up by the Boston suffragists at the time of President Wilson’s visit, when Cornelia and Betty and Mrs. Henderson and her daughter had gone to jail. The city had passed a special ordinance to meet that form of insurrection; it provided against “sauntering and loitering,” and the suffrage women had called it “loitering for liberty.”

Too bad that so many of the demonstrators were foreigners, especially Russians and Jews, who were disliked in Boston. Such names as Berkowitch and Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck and Shklar did not produce a good effect when read aloud over morning codfish-balls and coffee. But when you call for martyrs you cannot be fastidious, and your recruits will probably come from the martyr races--especially the Jews, who discovered the idea. So Berkowitch and Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck and Shklar, male and female, walked up and down in front of the high stone building with the golden dome, their faces pale and set with determination. With them walked Alfred Baker Lewis representing the socialists, and Harry J. Canter and Bertram Wolfe representing the communists, and Grace Hutchins representing Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.

State House guards lined the picket-fence, and square-jawed, hard-faced “plainclothesmen” slipped in and out among the crowd. The statue of Daniel Webster surveyed the scene impassively; also the tall equestrian figure of General Hooker, green with verdigris, and white with the droppings of birds on top of his head. From the windows above, the State House gang looked down, and cursed, or cracked their jokes; the bootleggers and friends of bootleggers, the sellers of public privileges, the boon companions of large scale plunderers, who had millions to spend for immunity.

Over on the other side of Beacon Street was the Shaw monument, glorifying a young Harvard aristocrat who had given his life to raise Negro slaves to manhood. Here walked “cops” with clubs in their hands and guns on their hips, wondering how long it would be before they were turned loose on the “Bolshevikis”; also members of the American Legion, stirring up the crowd, crying their hatred of the “goddam Reds.” Few of the spectators needed any incitement; their heads were stuffed with the contents of newspapers, and they were sure the “Guinneys” were guilty, and should have been “burned” long ago.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the number of the paraders had grown to a hundred and twenty-five, and the police decided that it had gone far enough. Captain McDevitt appeared and read the riot act. Under the law the “saunterers and loiterers” had seven minutes in which to disperse. When they continued marching, the police surrounded thirty-nine of them, and loaded them into patrol-wagons, and carted them to the old Joy Street police station, followed by a crowd shouting, “Beat them up! Hang them!” That was just words, of course; Massachusetts is a law-abiding Commonwealth, fitting completely into the formula of Lenin which Betty Alvin was so fond of quoting: “The state is a monopoly of violence.”

XVI

The monopolists of violence were making their preparations for such a show of their commodity as no city in America had ever witnessed in time of peace. The old Charlestown prison was turned into an arsenal; a cupola-crowned, octagon-shaped building of hand-cut stone, with red-brick wings covered with ivy, its walls now had dozens of machine guns mounted on top, and stores of ammunition, and sixteen searchlights playing at night. Eight hundred policemen, carrying riot guns with bayonets, took possession of the streets approaching the prison, and roped them off, stopping all traffic over Prison Point Bridge, and on Rutherford Avenue, a main thoroughfare, for half a mile. They were posted on all the house-tops surrounding the prison. In front of the gates were a hundred mounted Boston troopers, and a hundred of the state constabulary riding the streets. Firemen were on hand with high pressure hoses to repel mobs, and there was a plentiful store of tear and gas bombs, gas masks and bullet-proof vests.

All day Wednesday the eight hundred and eighty-one inmates of the prison went their usual round, with arms folded and lips shut. They were not supposed to know what was going on; but rumor spreads in penitentiaries, as fast as anywhere else. All the prisoners knew that the death-sentence was to be carried out at midnight, unless the courts or the Governor intervened. They knew that eighteen Western Union wires had been run into the officers’ club of the prison, and that reporters were swarming there to send out the news of the execution. At nine o’clock the prison lights winked out one by one; but nobody went to sleep.

In the death-house, in three narrow cells side by side, were the condemned men; Sacco and Vanzetti and Madeiros, the Portuguese who had managed to hitch his fate onto theirs. Sacco was on the fourth week of a “hungry strike,” and Vanzetti was also fasting; they were haggard and wasted, gray and grim. No one was permitted to see them, except their lawyers and relatives. Vanzetti had a sister on her way from Italy; if he were executed according to schedule she would not see him alive. The mother and sister of Madeiros had come for a visit; also Rosina Sacco, who spent her time trying to persuade her husband to sign some papers for the lawyers. But he was more stubborn than ever before. “They have had me nailed to the cross for seven years. Why should I keep it up?” Rosina broke down and had to be carried away.

The newspapermen noted that Sacco and Vanzetti did not behave like other condemned criminals; they did not chat with their keepers, nor sit and play cards with them, shoving the cards under the barred doors of the cells. They preferred to brood, staring at a little square patch of sunlight which fell from the roof upon the floor, the only reminder of the outside world. At night, when the searchlights played upon the death-house, they saw nothing, nor did they hear the sound of horses’ hoofs. They were permitted to have their books and papers; despite the fact that Vanzetti had written a statement in which he had called Governor Fuller a “murderer.” They wrote farewell letters to the world: still cherishing the “messianic delusion,” the idea that posterity would be interested in their sufferings.

XVII

All that day the lawyers rushed about, and the Governor was busy with his advisers. His Council was in session, also the seven ex-attorney-generals of the Commonwealth, invited to advise him as to the law on the matter of a respite. On the street outside, several squads of pickets were being dragged off to jail, with more or less violence. Those who had been arrested the day before were being denied their hearings in police-court, and condemned to pay fines without argument. Some refused, and went to jail; others paid, and came out to join the “death march” again.

Marvelous copy for the newspapers, which printed everybody’s guesses as to what was going to happen; every detail about the police preparations, and diagrams of the death-house, and photographs of the electric chair, and of the executioner--a gentleman who made a specialty of sending two thousand volts of electricity into living human bodies; he came from New York, it appeared, and was paid by the piece. For this job he was to get seven hundred and fifty dollars, and shocking as the statement may sound, he was overcharging the great Commonwealth. The people of Massachusetts, having elected their best business man to attend to their affairs, surely had a right to expect the discounts customary to the trade; but here was New York State getting its killings done by the same killer for only one hundred and fifty per!

Young Musmanno went to see his clients, to get another paper signed. They were glad to have some one to remind them that human affection still survived in a world given up to business. Sacco refused to sign, as usual; Vanzetti signed, hoping it would help both of them. He was reading the Beards on “The Rise of American Civilization”--at the same time that he watched its fall. He was not going to be able to finish these large, expensive volumes, so he wanted to give them to the young lawyer as a token of regard. But Musmanno couldn’t bear to take them, because it would be admitting that Vanzetti was to die that night. They had quite an argument about it; and several times Sacco would break in with his realist humor: “Take the books, Musmanno! Take the books!”

Musmanno did not take the books, but sped away to make another plea to the Governor. The prisoners began to sing; there was no law to prevent that, they sang every international song they knew, in Italian and in English.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation; A newer world’s in birth!

The rest of the prison heard no sound; but the searchlights flashed into their cells and kept them awake, and cries would run down the tiers of cells--hundreds of men shouting over and over: “Let them out! Let them out!” There was no one to interfere with them, for the guards, many of them, broke down and sobbed.

A singular adventure of Dorothy Parker, young poet from New York, sophisticated and ironical, but not liking official murder. She knew a newspaper reporter, and he got drunk, and volunteered to take her into the prison with him. He got her past the police-lines, and then went to get another drink, and never appeared again. So there was Dorothy, wandering about, patting the noses of state troopers’ horses, surveying the lines of guns, and testing Massachusetts prison discipline after bed-time. She sat with the reporters, and gathered the news, and then went to the telephone and called up Sacco-Vanzetti defense headquarters, and was overheard by a horrified deputy-warden--a spy of the enemy inside the defenses! A lovely story for bored reporters, smoking cigarettes and playing cards in the officers’ club, and begging for the tiniest item of news to put on the wires--starting with the mystic letters, “SV,” and ending with the promise: “Will be add.”

What was the supersalesman doing? Said Betty, “It is his idea of drama, to make publicity for himself!” But in this she was blinded by her hatred of the man. The plain truth was, he had decided to have the execution that night, and get it over with. But some of his advisers said it was impossible, with matters as they stood before the courts. Arthur Hill was arguing--a three hour argument before the Council. Up to the last half hour the issue hung in the balance, and swayed, now this way and now that.

Every preparation for death was made; the canvas cover was off the electric chair, and the current tested--the three victims listening to the sounds. They were dressed in their death-clothes--shirts with short sleeves and trousers with short legs, leaving room for the electrodes. But at ten-twenty the warden came to the reporters, his face wreathed in smiles, announcing that he had been notified by the Governor, the execution was “off” for that night. Wild excitement, and some joy, for the burly warden did not like his job the least bit. The reporters flashed the word “reprieve” to the farthest ends of the earth; but five minutes later the warden came in again, his face a blank--terribly sorry, he had further word from the Governor, the execution was “on” again, and was to take place at midnight.

The official witnesses who had been selected, and the one reporter, the Associated Press man, who had been favored above all other reporters, made ready to enter the death-house. But again the warden burst in, at twenty-seven minutes past eleven, almost in a state of collapse--he had had another talk with the Governor, and the execution was “off” for the next twelve days. The reporters leaped to the telegraph-keys--having before their minds a terrible calamity. There are newspapers in the big cities which make a practice of printing descriptions of things which haven’t happened, but are due to happen according to schedule; there would be New York papers having on their presses the news that the men were dead. Suppose some of these copies were to get onto the streets!

The “false execution”--such was the name by which the friends of the defense came to know that dreadful evening. They had sat in defense headquarters, and in a church behind the State House which had been mercifully opened to them, and waited for news, and pictured the worst. Rosina Sacco had sat for three hours holding a watch in her hand; when at last the news of the reprieve came in, she collapsed, and had to be carried to the home of friends. In the little apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill, Cornelia Thornwell was at the telephone, dizzy, but able to hear the voice of Deborah: “I told you, Mother! You should have believed me--he would not dare to disregard us.”

XXI. DAYS OF GRACE

Sacco and Vanzetti, brought up from Dedham jail on the first day of July, had been put into the death cells. When the Governor granted the first reprieve of thirty days, to allow the Lowell Commission to work, they had been moved back to what was called the Cherry Hill section of the prison. On the first of August, it being ten days to the new date of execution, they went back into the death cells. Now, the Governor having granted twelve days more, the rules required another return to the Cherry Hill section. “Oh, this is wearisome!” exclaimed Sacco. “This moving!”

He was on the twenty-sixth day of a fast, and barely able to totter. But he would not be assisted; no, he would take care of himself. A slow, feeble procession, the guards at his side ready to catch him if he fell. Vanzetti walked behind; having broken his fast, he had a little strength. Out into the open sunshine in the prison yard; a glimpse of the flower-beds along the walk, of blue sky overhead, white clouds, and gray and white gulls wheeling; the sounds of freight cars being shunted in the Boston and Maine yards, on the other side of the prison walls. A few steps to be climbed; wait, let him alone, Nick would do it by himself. At last he was lying on his cot in the new cell; tortured, distracted--when his wife and son came to see him they found his mind wandering. He was in what is known as a “blind” cell, having a solid wooden door in front of the barred iron door, and a peep-hole through which the keepers could look in.

Vanzetti also was in such a cell, and had fits of frenzied protest against the long drawn out and senseless agony. He talked aloud at night, and disturbed the other prisoners. His words being mostly in Italian, the guards and reporters said they were “incoherent.” He shouted about “the machine, the machine!”--which they took to mean the electric chair; not understanding the social system which is crushing human hopes throughout the world, grinding up the souls and minds of millions. Vanzetti was told that his cries were keeping other men awake, and that if he kept it up, he would be put in the padded cell, known as the “Blue Room.” At this he became furious, and dragged his cot and wooden bureau in front of the door of his cell, and warned the guards that they would not get him out alive.

Cornelia heard that news, and came to the prison early in the morning. They had refused her admission to the death-cells--only relatives and attorneys were allowed there, a strict rule. Now they told her that Vanzetti was “dangerous,” but she laughed at them; Bart had never been dangerous to those who used the methods and the language of love. She told them that she could tame this wild man for them, and without padded cells or strait-jackets. Since they dreaded a scandal very much, they gave way and took her through the prison yard, and into the corridor of “blind” cells.

Poor Bart--a dreadful change from the early days in that prison, when he had been so eager to see her, yet made her wait while he washed the coal dust from his face and hands! And always carefully shaved, clear-eyed, and with his unconscious natural dignity. Now he lay in a dark hole, feeble and wasted, his hair falling out, his teeth decaying, a gray and wasted specter. He started up when he heard her gentle voice, but then had to sink back on the cot, for he grew dizzy if he got up suddenly.

Cornelia asked the guard to let him come out into the corridor and sit with her. She knew that he would be gentle. The prisoner answered that of course he would; but he was not fit to be seen. She promised not to look at him, and so he came, and she looked into his eyes, and smiled and began to talk. She had been to Plymouth a few days ago, to interview a witness for Musmanno; she had seen the Brinis, and had much news about the family. They had moved to a place on Cherry Court, and the baby was grown up. A hundred items of gossip--even the latest reports from Vincenzo’s garden, and the explosion which had occurred in his home-made wine!

And then news about that most precious of young creatures, Rupert Alvin Thornwell Randall--a mouthful of names. He was a sturdy one; two years old now, toddling and talking at a great rate; spending the summer at his grandmother’s country place on the North Shore, while his mother gave her time to the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. Betty had been so determined that this infant should grow up in a proletarian environment--but alas, it was midsummer, and hot in a little apartment, and out there on the North Shore were cool, refreshing breezes; so the grandparents had the precious one, completely surrounded by a battalion of servants, and all the demoralizing uses of luxury. Betty had to choose between saving one infant and saving the world--a dilemma frequently encountered by reformers. Cornelia told Bart a little about the family duel, which had been going on for two years; now the great banker and his wife had got their way. Bart said they always would, so long as they were able to control the things which other persons needed.

Vanzetti had been writing off and on, in spite of handicaps. He had a statement which he wanted Cornelia to revise; she might assure the warden that there was nothing in it like calling the Governor a “murderer,” which had made such a terrible scandal throughout all Massachusetts. He wanted to give her a lot of his manuscripts to keep--but she didn’t want to take them, because that would be admitting that he was going to die! In the course of their talk he developed signs of timidity, and said he had written something that he had wanted to show to her, but he was afraid maybe it wasn’t very good; it was a poem--a poem about a nightingale! Cornelia reassured him--it wouldn’t need to be very good in order for her to be interested in it. He drew it from the lot of papers, and read it to her: this “dangerous” one, sitting in the corridor of the “blind” cells, with a lynx-eyed guard watching every move and listening to every word. The poem began:

_When in the course of endless cosmic changes, Upon the close of winter dark and drear From far away, benignant, crowned with roses, We see the lovely, longed-for spring appear...._

Cornelia had to tell the poet that such emotions had been expressed before; nevertheless, there were tears to her eyes over the effort of a wop in prison to describe a nightingale in Italy! Springtime in Villafalletto--the fruit trees in blossom and the vegetables thriving--and the poet behind bars, condemned to death! Was it because of her aching pity for the doomed idealist, or was there really beauty and pathos in the closing lines?

_Thus in my garden, in bright morning’s glow, I saw thee in an April long ago._

Twelve days of grace had been granted to the defense. Twelve days in which to educate the world! Twelve days for lawyers to compose more briefs, packed full of legal formulas and imposing citations; to hop into automobiles or airplanes, and go hunting for judges, and argue, plead, insist--there could not be a total failure of law, when new evidence had been discovered, proving that innocent men were about to be executed. The judges would listen politely and patiently; but in all that long list, from the lowest to the highest, not one would think about anything but precedent, not one would act upon a basis of mercy or justice, political wisdom or ordinary common sense.

“Unless a million men can be mobilized in our defense, we are lost!” Such had been Vanzetti’s statement, two or three years ago. It had taken the United States government a year to mobilize a million men, and the Sacco-Vanzetti committee now set out to do it in twelve days. They drafted appeals and sent long telegrams--a great sum in tolls each day. Mass meetings were held in hundreds of American cities and towns, and in all the capitals of the world; the newspapers were full of reports of riots and strikes. But such events only stiffened the backs of the State House crowd; this was “Bolshevism,” and the answer to it was several thousand rifles with bayonets, and a plentiful supply of gas bombs and machine guns.

The one thing the State House crowd really feared was a general strike. That was the weapon which had saved the lives of Ettor and Giovannitti, and which might have saved Sacco and Vanzetti. The police were on the alert day and night for the first move towards it. Two Jews, officers of the cap makers’ union, started a movement for a strike among the clothing workers of Boston, and were arrested and framed on a bombing charge. The police hadn’t the slightest thing on them, and confessed it with a laugh when they released them--after the execution. There were spies everywhere, bringing word, hour by hour, of what was going on in all the centers of sedition. The ruling classes waited for the least little sign of violence, the least departure from the rôle of martyrdom--so odious and exasperating to those who believe in gold and steel.

The “highbrow” sympathizers labored to mobilize liberal opinion. They organized emergency groups and drafted appeals to the Governor, and collected signatures from leaders of every form of intellectual and artistic activity. It was a simple matter to get such persons to voice their horror at the idea of executing men after seven years on the rack, and when there were so many reasons for doubting their guilt. The trouble was that after the signatures were collected, there was nothing to do with them--except to take them to the State House, and turn them over to a man who read the Saturday Evening Post, and to whom a list of leaders of international thought was of less significance than a list of the delegates to an “ad-men’s” convention.

This salesman of motor cars posed as being completely impartial, and delighted to assure his visitors, “I don’t know what an anarchist is, I don’t pay any attention to that sort of stuff.” But right in the midst of these pretenses some researcher in Washington dug up his hate-speeches--the only ones of any consequence he had made during his four years’ service in Congress. He had been an ardent advocate of the exclusion of Victor Berger, the socialist congressman, and with hot anger had called for “the crucifixion of disloyalty, the nailing of sedition to the cross of free government, where the whole brood of anarchists, bolsheviks, I.W.W.’s and revolutionaries may see and read a solemn warning.” He had talked about the “red scum,” and the “agents of the red flag,” and had denounced opposition to preparedness as “a devilish scheme of undermining the morale of the people.” These tirades had been delivered just before a thousand men and women were dragged from their homes and thrown into Boston jails.

III

Not since the days of the Civil War had there been such a test of the consciences of men and women in Boston. Strange things happened, unexpected workings of the spirit. To Cornelia Thornwell in her little apartment came the second son of James Scatterbridge, known as “James’s Josiah,” and sat in a chair and fixed his pale blue, earnest eyes upon her, and in a timid, half-apologetic voice began, “Grandmother, it seems to me as if I ought to do something to help.”

“There is plenty to be done,” said the old lady.

“I decided I ought to contribute some money, so I went to defense headquarters yesterday evening. I had made up my mind to give half my vacation allowance. But while I was there three Italian laborers came in; you could see they had just come from the day’s work, their shoes were covered with mortar, and the backs of their hands had big knotted veins on them. They brought more than fifty dollars which they had collected on the job. I couldn’t understand what they said, but I watched their faces, and I realized it was money which their wives and children must need, so I got ashamed of myself. I think we all have too easy a time. I gave every cent I had, and now I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Lots of college boys go to work in vacation time, Josiah, and sometimes they learn more than in classes.”

“I know, Grandmother, and that’s what I’ll do; but first it seemed to me that I oughtn’t to let you and Betty and Joe carry the brunt of all this. Betty says she’s going to get arrested next Sunday, and it seems to me I ought to go, too. What do you think?”

Another family problem! Cornelia declined to solve it; she said that in matters of conscience, every person has to act for himself. “It will make your father very angry, of course.”

“I know; he’s terrible when he gets excited about the Reds. But I don’t think it’s quite the same as being a Red, to say that men ought not to be executed when there is so much doubt of their guilt. But I can’t get Father to see that at all. You’ll be shocked, I know, but he said they ought to be executed, anyhow.”

“I’ve heard many people say that, Josiah; it is almost a respectable opinion in Boston. A member of the Governor’s Council has voiced it, I am told.”

“We’re having a funny time at home right now,” continued the youth. “Have you heard about Great-uncle Abner? He is determined to break into the Transcript with a letter about the case, and Father has promised Uncle Henry that he won’t let him--out of respect for you, of course.”

“I know,” said Cornelia. “It is very kind of them.”

“Father is provoked with you, but he won’t have any scandal, and he has been having all the servants bring Great-uncle Abner’s letters to him, instead of posting them. Great-uncle Abner found out about it, and there was a terrible row, you could hear him shouting all over the house: ‘Am I in jail or am I not in jail? Answer me that? Have I been legally committed? If not, take me out of here, and let me die a free man!’ He just wouldn’t give up, and Father had to pacify him, for fear he’d have another stroke. What Father did--you won’t believe it--he promised to send the letter to the Transcript, and he had a printer take the editorial page from an early edition, and reproduce it complete, with the page on the other side also--but with Great-uncle Abner’s letter in it. It was quite wonderful--it would have fooled anybody. They put it in the evening edition and brought it to the old gentleman, and he was as pleased as punch--read it about twenty times, and some of his old friends were let in on the secret, and came to see him and patted him on the back and said it was a great letter and ought to settle the case with the Governor. It said there ought to be a Bolshevik hanging from each tree on the Common, and they ought not to have any trials. It said that American institutions must be saved from rape at the hands of Russian gold and Italian dynamite. It was almost as bad as some of the letters that really get published!”

The case worked also upon the consciences of persons who were cursed with artistic temperaments. Such unfortunates read the letters of Vanzetti and recognized a brother in distress. He who had made himself a master of English prose spoke to all other writers, now as in times to come. They gathered from far and near, anxious that a great soul and a prophet should be recognized before he was dead.

There came Arturo Giovannitti, compatriot and fellow-victim of the “frame-up” system: one of those whom Captain Proctor had set out to “get,” in the days of Proctor’s prime, before his conscience began to trouble him. For more than a year Giovannitti had lain in Salem jail, and had written a haunting poem, “The Walker.”

_One-two-three-four: four paces and the wall; One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate._

Now he walked a somewhat longer road in front of the State House with the golden dome; measured, not by paces, but by minutes--one-two-three-four-five-six-seven. He went to the Common, temple of free speech with elm-tree limbs for arches. “Fellow-workers,” he began--being an I.W.W., that was his formula. “Break it up!” shouted “Mickey the Gunman.” “You’ve said enough!” But the poet protested: “I haven’t said anything yet! Wait till I finish before you arrest any one.” “You’re talking against the courts!” was the answer of the superintendent of police. “You’re not allowed to talk against the courts!” The mounted troopers drove their reluctant horses into the crowd. “Break it up! Move along there!”

John Dos Passos came, playwright and novelist, genial, gentle, and bold as a young bull buffalo. A graduate of Harvard, he came to save the honor of his alma mater. “You have put your name and indirectly the name of the university to an infamous document”--so he wrote to President Lowell; and then, since no Boston paper would publish his letter, he went out on the picket-line and exposed his head to the policemen’s clubs, and his skin to the vermin in the old Joy Street police-station.

“Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng!” There thronged George L. Teeple, of the class of ’97, and got himself arrested with the other pickets, and read a statement in court, paying fifteen dollars extra for the privilege, because the judge remarked that there might be an excuse for ignorant foreigners, but there was very little excuse for a Harvard man to violate the law.

Also Powers Hapgood, nephew of Norman and of Hutchins. His was not the sort of head the Boston police were used to breaking. He had completed four years’ work at Harvard in three; he had “made” the Dickey and the Hasty Pudding Club, the varsity track squad and the Harvard “Crimson.” He had been in the service abroad, and was one of the few undergraduates honored by election to the Harvard Memorial Society. He was one of those young Americans in whom readers of fiction refuse to believe; “unreal and made to order,” they say, of a college youth who travels over the country working in coal mines, and becoming a leader of the left wing miners. Now he came to express his opinion of President Lowell, and the opinion was such that official Boston shut it up in the Psychopathic Hospital.

Heywood Broun was carrying on the same fight in New York, as “colyumist” of the World, at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week. Broun had been “flunked out” of Harvard in his youth, and this may have made him feel disrespectful. “From now on,” he wrote, “will the institution of learning at Cambridge which we once called Harvard be known as Hangman’s House?” The World published that, but refused to publish the next articles, so the “colyumnist” went on a “permanent strike,” which made an enormous sensation among the literati. An extraordinary thing, the way the case “got” the intelligentsia, even that portion which prides itself most upon being hard-boiled and immune to social emotions.

Also there came alumni of the University of Hard Knocks. Those foreign names which pleased the readers of Boston newspapers so little belonged to clothing-workers who had given up their jobs, and spent their savings to come and jeopardize their skulls; to sailors from the port, to iron-workers, barbers, bakers and waiters; also to poets and writers who had educated themselves, and thus could understand the soul of Vanzetti. There came Michael Gold, a young Jew from the slums of New York, who had been a newspaper reporter in Boston when not yet out of his teens, and had been one of that group of anarchist sympathizers whom Cornelia had seen, eleven years ago, accompanying Galleani to the Plymouth cordage strike.

Mike was now a playwright and editor of the New Masses, but resented being classified as an “intellectual,” and wanted to remain a worker; so he dressed in khaki, which gave a shock to Boston. He wandered about, fascinated by the spectacle of a city gone mad with fear. He listened to the conversation of sleek clerks and stock-brokers of State Street, ex-football players of Harvard who wished they might have a chance to tackle the “Reds.” He listened to taxi-drivers and soda-jerkers, who knew what they had read in a capitalist newspaper, or learned from others who had read it in some other capitalist newspaper. On the afternoon of the “false execution” he joined the “death march” in front of the State House, and the same two iron-handed cops who grabbed Dorothy Parker the poet grabbed Mike Gold the playwright, and hauled them away to the oddly-named Joy Street police station. “Hang them! Hang the anarchists!” cried the straw-hatted mob; and Mike, who had written a life of John Brown, saw the ghost of William Lloyd Garrison going down the street with a rope about his waist, followed by the “mob in broadcloth,” crying “Hang him! Hang the abolitionist!”

Those Boston merchants of a hundred years ago had been, some of them, the “bootleggers” of their day; smuggling “black ivory” from Africa, Negro slaves whose labor would be turned into molasses in Louisiana. The molasses would be brought to New England and made into rum, and the rum would go back to Africa, to make drunk the savage chiefs whose war-victims would compose the next bootleg cargo. Now the great-great-grandsons of those old merchants bore the same names, and looked so much like their ancestors that when they came up for election to the Somerset Club, the directors thought they were voting for the ancestors. These great-great-grandsons had imported hundreds of thousands of white niggers from the Mediterranean and Baltic lands, to operate their steam and electric machines, and had built a colossal system for the exploiting of this new slave labor. These new masters considered themselves civilized, and were willing to install “welfare work,” and have their wives “do charity.” But at the same time they looked upon these foreign hordes with mingled contempt and fear, and dreaded the day when they might refuse obedience. To suggest this to them was the worst crime that could be committed in modern New England; the “black abolitionists” of 1831 had been replaced, as objects of ruling class hatred, by the “red scum” of 1927.

So it was that Boston was under what amounted to martial law, and there were more detectives watching strangers than there were strangers. Any one who wore a beard, or had a dark face, was liable to be halted on the street and ordered to give an account of himself. A messenger carrying a box of seidlitz powders had to stop for a chemical analysis. Helen Black and Ann Washington Craton--a descendant of the father of her country--were arrested and taken to the police station and cross-questioned for hours; the reason assigned being that they “looked like New Yorkers.” Six Italians arrived in an automobile, and two of them needed a shave, so they were held on a bombing charge.

Joe Randall, of course, was a marked man; the fact that he wrote articles for newspapers and posed as a reporter only made him worse than the other “Bolsheviks.” Detectives followed him everywhere, in restaurants, in drug stores when he bought an ice cream soda, in barber shops when he got a shave. He made trouble for them by insisting upon talking with them, which was destructive of morale and against the ethics of “shadowing.” New “dicks” were substituted, but Joe said you could always recognize them by their blank and stupid faces; there was no other occupation by which such low-grade persons could manage to be well-dressed and well-fed.

Impossible to imagine anything more grotesque than the activities of these anthropoid mentalities, trying to deal with a world of which they had no gleam of understanding. Some of the things they did were beyond the absurdities of musical comedy. Heywood Broun’s wife, Ruth Hale, came to Boston at the height of the tragedy. Two sleuths of the city spent the night in a Ford car, keeping watch on Hanover street, opposite defense headquarters, and in the morning a newspaper man asked them what they had been doing, and the answer was, “We had a straight tip on a bomb-plot, and we were watching for the bombers.” “Who are they?” asked the reporter. The reply was, “Two women from New York, Ruth Hale and Dorothy Parker.”

On Thursday, the eleventh, Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court allowed a bill of exceptions from his ruling to go to the Full Court. Also Web Thayer was persuaded, for the sake of appearance, to permit exceptions to his rulings to be carried up. So there were two more hopes for salvation from the courts; Massachusetts was going to lean over backwards in respecting the legal rights of two convicted wops. Chief Justice Rugg was ill, and Crosby was in Europe; Sanderson was barred from considering his own ruling, so there were Braley, Wait, Carroll, and Pierce, with Braley, oldest member, presiding. He issued a summons for a special sitting on the following Tuesday, to listen to arguments of counsel.

Hope once more in the hearts of all believers in law and order. Surely the ruling group was coming to its senses; it had realized the frightful blunder it was making, and had chosen a dignified way to back down! Patience now, and keep cool, and don’t do anything to excite public feeling, and make it harder for the learned justices! Stop the wild talk, and keep the New York radicals off the streets and out of the newspapers! Above all, no disorders on the Common, nor in front of the State House! So argued the “respectables.”

Was there really a chance? Or was it merely that those in charge of affairs wanted it to seem that way? Quincy Thornwell came to his Aunt Cornelia, bringing rumors: the Governor had talked with So-and-so, and had said this and that. More important yet, Mr. Lowell was showing signs of weakening; he was defending himself, for the first time in his long life. One of the “middle minds” had been to see him, and he had argued until two o’clock in the morning, trying to justify his decision; he had been so anxious about it that he had followed his visitor downstairs in his pajamas, and out into the garden, flashing a torchlight into the bushes to make sure there were no bombers hiding. Quincy Thornwell chuckled over the picture: assuredly the strangest sight ever witnessed by the chaste nymphs who haunt the shades of the classic elms of Harvard!

And then the learned justices of the Supreme Judicial Court, actually giving signs of humanity! Justice Wait had made a speech, defending the action of the court; and now here was the wife of another one, the presiding justice, Braley, telephoning to Mrs. Jessica Henderson; a Leach of Bridgewater she was, a highly respected person, and twice she called up to say: “Don’t worry, my dear, everything is coming out all right, I assure you. They are not going to let them be executed, they will find some way out. The judge does not believe in capital punishment.” What could have been the meaning of that? Could it be that these old boys were fooling their own wives, in the effort to cheer them up and keep peace in the family? Or were they using the wives to lull the defense, and damp the dangerous agitation during the critical days? Impossible to guess.

VII

In the Sacco-Vanzetti committee the never-ceasing struggle between those who wanted to be judicious and those who wanted to make propaganda. Lawyers and college professors telephoning in, or calling to make personal pleas: “Remember this is Boston, and keep the New York nuts out of the limelight!” But the “New York nuts” had something to say about that, and so had the Boston newspapers. The visitors came hiking, wearing oil-cloth placards over their shoulders, getting cursed and nearly mobbed in each respectable town they passed through. They came in sport-cars, with bootleg bottles in their baggage. Girls came in pants, and men with no hats or neckties. One brought a portable typewriter, ready for work, and when he found no room in headquarters, he set himself up on the curbstone outside the Hotel Bellevue, and started writing letters for Sacco and Vanzetti. The newspapers, of course, got pictures of him at once. Also they eagerly interviewed a young man who announced his intention of marching to Dedham jail to rescue Sacco and Vanzetti, and was disconcerted to learn that his campaign maps were out of date.

Such were the surface aspects of the invasion, easy to see and to record. But there was another aspect, not so obvious to Boston newspapermen, nor so diverting to their readers. The soul of the demonstration, a common feeling which animated all the participants, men and women, old and young, rich and poor, educated and ignorant: a sense of black despair, of agonizing littleness in the face of a colossal evil; an impotent rage, a hatred, bitter as gall, rolling up in their minds, for this whole great city of greed masked by bigotry--smug and polite and treacherous, cultured and correct and deadly.

Very few of these agitators were professionals; not many of them had any training, any party to guide and support them. They came as individuals, hesitating and confused. They didn’t like to do what they were doing; the women, and many of the men, felt like Lady Godiva riding through the town naked--worse even than she, because they had no certainty of accomplishing anything; perhaps they were making fools of themselves to no purpose at all.

They came because American labor would not come. Vanzetti had called for a million workers, and the million workers answered, “What the hell?” Most of them were content for Vanzetti to die--so that American prosperity might live; they were ready to make that sacrifice to Moloch, precisely as the mothers and fathers of Carthage were ready to put their infants into the red-hot iron arms of the god, so that Carthage might live. So, instead of the million workers, came one or two hundred poets, painters, dreamers and lovers of beauty, Greenwich Villagers, bums, bohemians--whatever names Boston, the correct and murderous, might choose to call them. A pitiful little group, throwing themselves against the iron battlements of American capitalism, with its machine-guns and poison gas bombs, its police in the front rank and army and navy in reserve.

And for every dreamer who came, there were thousands who stayed at home, chained by poverty, or a greater share of timidity; waiting, waiting, with a ghastly sense of uncertainty, feeling themselves more effectively imprisoned than Sacco and Vanzetti. Writing letters, but not knowing if they were read; sending telegrams--like shooting arrows into the dark! Unable to get any real news--a few bare events each day in the papers, but no opinions, no guidance, no light. The radio grinding out its eternal silly thumping of drums and whining of saxophones--this greatest story in modern American history not worth a moment’s attention!

VIII

Sunday was coming, and what was the committee going to do? Was there to be another meeting on the Common, or should they oblige the lawyers and wait? Agonized arguments, turning into bitter quarrels. “When did you come into this case?” the old-timers would jeer; and to that the answer was obvious: “A fine mess you made of it!” The communists would rage at the members of the committee: “Do you think you own Sacco and Vanzetti? What do you want--to put their ashes in an urn and set it on your parlor mantel?”

Some were determined to speak on the Common, committee or no committee, police or no police. The Socialist Labor Party had a permit not yet confiscated, and the Sacco-Vanzetti defenders would use that; so it was announced, and the would-be martyrs prepared placards on canvas, which could be folded up and hidden under the clothing. Betty and Joe refused to tell the family what they were going to do; so here came Deborah in all her majesty, mixing with the “mob” on the Common, walking about unable to keep her hands quiet, so agitated she was. When it came to a test, she really did love her daughter, in spite of so many bitter words spoken during eleven years of wrangling. After all, it was “Boston”; conscience was conscience, and when you followed yours, you commanded respect from others who followed theirs. When the little group of white-faced men and women marched into the midst of armed ruffians, Deborah’s emotions were those which had been felt by patrician Roman matrons, when their Christian children walked into the arena among the lions.

Police Judge Zottoli, an Italian anxious to prove his respectability, had announced that for those arrested in future “the sky would be the limit.” But evidently among those in authority there must have been some wiser heads. The police had orders to disperse all gatherings, to allow no speeches, but to do as little arresting as possible; no more martyrs--and especially no well-dressed ones! A curious experience for young ladies who lived on Beacon Street, within sight of this greensward; they were made to leap out of the way of mounted troopers, they had their placards taken away, and their arms squeezed black and blue--but always the last word was, “Move on! Keep moving!” Were these the traffic officers who had been helping them across street-crossings, and knew them? Or were they detectives who had been keeping watch over the wedding presents in fashionable homes?

The permit which the Sacco Vanzetti committee had hoped to obtain was found to be unavailable; so those who attempted to speak would all be outlaws. They brought soap-boxes--and the “cops” took them away and broke them up. For Joe Randall two young martyrs upon a sudden impulse got down and made a soap-box of their backs; on this precarious pedestal Joe stood, and began: “Fellow-citizens of Massachusetts, we are here to assert the fundamental principles of free speech”--and that was all, for there were three husky “dicks” who had been following Joe about the field, and grabbed him by the arms and pulled him from his platform and led him away.

Joe had made one concession to his anxious grandmother-in-law, he would not resist and get his head broken; he went quietly--and only when he was out on Beacon Street did he discover the scurvy trick which had been played upon him. The three huskies gave him a shove and said, “Move along now, young fellow, and keep moving.” “What do you mean, am I not under arrest?” “Move along, buddy, what do you want to get into trouble for?” When he tried to force his way back, they held him. They would not fight him, they would merely block his way, and see that he didn’t get to the Common. Later on, when Joe learned that the same thing had happened to “James’s Josiah,” he realized that it could not have been an accident; some member of an all-powerful family had called in a detective agency, and paid a fancy price to keep his relatives out of jail, and his family name out of the papers!

It was Powers Hapgood who made the real fight that Sunday before the last; Powers, with a young Italian sewing-machine repairer named Cosimo Carvotta, who got inspired by Powers’ eloquence, and insisted on rescuing him from the entire police force of the City of Boston. Cosimo had upon him a pocket-knife containing a small screw-driver, an inch long, used upon sewing-machines; he did not try to use it, but they found it in his pocket at the police station, and it was enough to constitute a “dirk,” and make a startling story in the papers.

As for Powers, he had a highly honorific arrest, performed by Superintendent Crowley and a captain and a sergeant and other majesties. “I insist on the right of free speech! The people must save Sacco and Vanzetti! We must not allow our comrades to be murdered! Don’t forget, Comrades--keep it up--save the men!”--thus the member of the Dickey and the Hasty Pudding Club and the Harvard Memorial Society, being dragged away to the police-box at the corner of Charles and Beacon streets. “Mickey the Gunman” himself pulled the hook which summoned the patrol-wagon, and within five minutes there were a hundred officers at the spot, and a squadron of mounted men to drive back the crowd.

The special sitting of the Supreme Judicial Court was set for Tuesday the sixteenth at ten o’clock. Six hours before that came a dreadful event; some one put dynamite on the front porch of the home of one of the Sacco-Vanzetti jurors, in East Milton, and blew out the front of the house. Once more the authorities were certain that this had been the work of friends of Sacco and Vanzetti; whereas the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti were equally certain that it was the work of their worst enemies. They called attention to the peculiar placing of the dynamite, to make a loud noise and not hurt any one; they called attention to its exact timing--when it would do the utmost possible harm and least possible good to the defense.

The mystery was never solved; but the Governor took occasion to write a letter to the juror, denouncing those who were trying to “coerce the courts,” and at the same time assuring the victim that the cost of repairing his home would be paid by the Commonwealth. A singular impulse of generosity from an official who just recently had vetoed a bill providing for compensation to state employees who had been injured in the performance of their duties!

With the crash of this bomb echoing in their ears, the four black-robed justices assembled. The courthouse, and Pemberton Square around it, presented a scene of war. Benches were placed for barriers in front of courtroom doors, and Cornelia had to exhibit the contents of her handbag before she entered the room. She noticed that detectives assigned the little group of “Reds” to special seats, and then stood near them. Most of the crowd did not get in at all.

There sat in a row, behind a long raised desk, the four white-haired old gentlemen who held the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti in their hands. Henry King Braley, former city solicitor and mayor of Fall River, now seventy-seven years of age; Edward Peter Pierce, recently tried for misconduct, and convicted of very bad taste, seventy-five years of age; James Bernard Carroll, former city solicitor of Springfield, seventy-one years of age; and William Cushing Wait, former city alderman of Boston, sixty-seven years of age. Braley was a fellow-alumnus of Thayer’s, Pierce and Wait were fellow-alumni of Katzmann’s, while Carroll was a graduate of Holy Cross, which made him a fellow-alumnus of St. Peter. They told their fellow-alumni Arthur Hill and Arthur Reading, that they might have all the time needed; and then they sat, like four black-and-white images, motionless and impassive, while Mr. Hill recited the list of the high crimes of their fellow-alumni, Thayer and, indirectly, Katzmann.

Mr. Hill spared nothing of the story of “Web’s” prejudice and the manifold proofs thereof. Also he asked a hearing for the new evidence--of which more was coming in every day. He called it “monstrous” to maintain that there was any stage in the process of taking men’s lives when it ceased to be possible to present newly discovered evidence to establish their innocence. “It is the bench and bar of Massachusetts that is on trial,” he declared. “It is our entire system of criminal law.” He might have added “our entire system of criminal capitalism,” but his vision did not extend that far, and very surely he could not have made it clear to four members of the Union Club of Boston.

Then came the genial Mr. Reading, with pockets stuffed with the money of the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.” He asserted his solemn faith that Judge Thayer had been just and unprejudiced; nor was he in the least afraid of being “monstrous” in reciting the law which specified that after sentence had been pronounced by the trial judge, no motion for a new trial could be entertained, no matter what the new evidence might be. The four old gentlemen mumbled a few questions to the lawyers, impossible for the spectators to hear; and then they gathered up their books and papers, and the session was adjourned. The friends of Sacco and Vanzetti went home, to continue that process of waiting in which they had become so expert in the course of seven years, three months, and eleven days.

But they did not have to wait very long this time. Massachusetts took pride in paying no heed to “outside clamor,” but here was a different situation--a military expense of great sums every day, and enormous losses to retail trade. It was a time for sleepy old gentlemen to wake up and earn their keep. On Tuesday the hearing, on Friday the decision--an unprecedented procedure!

The document was written by Justice Braley, that oldest gentleman whose wife had more than once telephoned to Jessica Henderson, assuring her that everything was all right, no need to worry, the judge did not believe in capital punishment. Now the judge spoke for himself. With the other three judges concurring, he said that the legal system of the great Commonwealth was infallible, and the fact that it contravened decency, humanity, and common sense was of no significance. A long decision, highly technical, bristling with citations; the heart of it in one dreadful sentence: “A motion for a new trial in capital cases comes too late if made after sentence has been pronounced.” Such is the law of the Brahmins and the Blue-bloods, which altereth not! “The exceptions are overruled.”

Horror among so-called “liberals,” those of Boston, as well as those who had come from outside! They had staked all their hopes upon the courts; they had pleaded, argued, practically forced the defense committee to obey, to let them handle it, to put their trust in the processes of law. And here suddenly was the ghastly fact revealed in all its nakedness--there was no law! There was only the class struggle! Exactly as Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been saying for twelve years, ever since Cornelia had first met him: there was a propertied class, and there was a laboring class, and between them there was a war!

And now a battle under way, and the lines drawn, and deserters hated and punished--if necessary, killed! The immense, rich, eager, nervous, implacable young Empire was smashing a revolt of its slaves, crucifying its resisting gladiators by the roadside for a warning to all the rest! This legal decision was a searchlight, flashing suddenly upon that bloody deed! The Sacco-Vanzetti case was no longer the casual venality of a few local politicians, no longer the accidental malice of one elderly legal despot; the Sacco-Vanzetti case was capitalist government, the same in America as everywhere else in the world--the will of a predatory class!

Once before America had been like that, when the slave power had ruled it, and in those old days New England had had one poet with the gift of ecstasy and prophetic rage. A fugitive slave was sent back from Massachusetts, and Whittier, the Quaker abolitionist, pictured Liberty marching handcuffed down the street--

_And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong, Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God The blasphemy of wrong...._

_“Mother of Freedom, wise and brave, Rise awful in thy strength,” I said; Ah me! I spake but to the dead; I stood upon her grave!_

A dreadful ordeal for the whole prison had been that “hungry strike” of Sacco’s. They didn’t want him to die that way--it was against the rules, and an impropriety; also they were sorry for him, and for his wife and child. They argued and pleaded; the wife and child argued and pleaded, but Nick was obdurate; he would not eat. Neither would he sign any papers for capitalist courts or governors; he would not ask for mercy or for pardon--he was an innocent man, and would die protesting it.

On the thirty-first day of the fast he became so weak that the prison doctor decided to act. He brought some hot beef broth to the cell, and reminded Nick how very painful it was to be fed by a tube through the nose. He went so far as to take hold of Nick’s nose, and say that he was going to pour the broth down his throat. So Nick gave up, and drank. They had all their strength, and he had little of his.

Then came young Musmanno, devoted slave of the case, broken-hearted, and shrinking from the job he had to do. They took him first to the cell of Nick, who was eating something. Said the young lawyer: “You are a brave man, aren’t you, Nick?”

It was the correct psychology; Nick said, quietly, “Yes, I think I am.”

“Well then, I must tell you that the Full Court has turned down our appeal.”

“I expected it,” said Nick, quietly. “What are they there for?” He did not wince; but he pushed his bowls and dishes aside and forgot them. “Sure,” he said, “they have us, they will kill us. We will die like men.” Then he said, “I will write a letter to Dante. You will come for that, Musmanno, I want the bimbo to have it when he gets older, and will be able to think about it.” “Bimbo” is an Italian endearment for a boy; and Musmanno said he would come without fail.

He went to Vanzetti, the man of emotions, of words rather than of actions. When Bart heard the news, his eyes opened wide like saucers, and he sat staring before him, as if he were in a dream. He got up, and began pacing his cell wildly, shouting in Italian. “There is nobody more innocent in all this world!” He would not take it as a matter of course that a man should die; he was a propagandist, and had reason to live. “A million men! A million men!” he cried. He began to demand that a microphone be brought to his cell, so that he might speak to the workers of the world. Musmanno had to say that both these propositions were equally impossible. All they could do was to make more appeals before more judges. He was leaving for Washington that night, to file an application before the United States Supreme Court.

The young lawyer came back late in the afternoon, but found that Nick had not been able to work upon the letter to his son. They had moved him back into the death cells for the third time. “Oh, this is wearisome!” He lay, very weak, his mind unsteady. He could only say, “I can’t understand it. They will kill us?” Vanzetti was sunk in melancholy, and would say nothing except, “My sister! My sister!”

Luigia Vanzetti landed in New York that day; a quiet, thin, sad-faced little woman in a faded brown traveling cloak, coming second class, her name kept off the passenger list of the great liner. A strange fate to have befallen a simple woman of an Italian village; in Paris she had been set to march at the head of a huge parade of workers. Now, bewildered by throngs coming to greet her, and by urgent young newspapermen of this strange land of hustle and sensation, she clutched a gold medallion of the Madonna in her hand; relying upon this ancient magic to save her unhappy brother, whom she had not seen for nineteen years. She hoped to convert him, she said; “I will ask him to see a priest, and return to the faith of his childhood, of those happy days before he left us.” Felicani and Rosina Sacco had come to meet her, and persuaded her to soft-pedal that aspect of her mission. As it turned out, she was no more able to save her brother’s soul than she was to save his life.

XII

Henry Cabot Winters had to postpone important legal conferences, worth at least a thousand dollars a day to him, to come and comfort his distracted mother-in-law; to argue with her, explain to her--or just listen to her. “Yes, I know, Mother, it seems very wrong that new evidence cannot be considered; my judgment is, the Supreme Court won’t stand by that ruling very long--they’ll reverse it, or the law will be changed. But this time they must have it. You see, this Sacco-Vanzetti evidence is not real evidence to them--it’s just more wops telling the same old lies, and every one is tired of it.”

“Too tired to consider the good of our courts, Henry!”

“It’s just the other way to them, Mother--they think they are standing by the courts. You must realize the dilemma; how can they throw Web down?”

“It would seem to me that Web has thrown them down.”

“Web has been a vulgarian, of course. But after all, what he said is what everybody thinks; and he’s been game, you have to admit that--he had a nasty job, and he stuck to it like a little soldier. For seven years he’s risked being shot or dynamited every hour of his life; and now, to repudiate him--it can’t be thought of.”

“Couldn’t they find some other ground to grant a new trial?”

“It’s all very well to talk about new trials as a matter of propaganda; but if you mean it seriously, stop and think. With this agitation and uproar--how could there be a trial? You couldn’t get a jury in a hundred years. Look at what happened to those people in East Milton! Think of the witnesses--appearing and testifying, with dynamite exploding all around them!”

“We wouldn’t need dynamite for those witnesses, Henry; with what we know about them to-day, there isn’t one who would dare take the stand.”

“All right, grant that is true--where does it leave us? It comes to this, the Commonwealth has had two Reds within a few minutes of the electric chair, and now has to admit that it has no real evidence, the whole thing blows up. We might just as well hand our courts over to the Bolsheviks and be done with it. We’d never be able to convict another one.”

“So, Henry, you are going to send two innocent men to death, because it would be embarrassing to admit a blunder!”

The lawyer smiled patiently. “Don’t get to believing your rhetoric, and putting it off on me, Mother! You asked me what is in the minds of the Supreme Court, and I am telling you. When I talk to lawyers about it, and bring them to admit that maybe the evidence is weak, that is the argument they end up with--the courts must be sustained.”

“A brand new idea of justice, Henry!”

The other smiled again. “On the contrary, an idea as old as courts themselves.” He cited the pronouncement of some fine old Tory judge to a too-urgent plaintiff: “It were better that you be ruined, than that the law be changed for the likes of you!” Henry was no legal scholar; but because he lived in Boston, it was necessary for him to possess some handy learning, for public purposes. He told his mother-in-law that this pungent saying went back even farther; it was in Law-French, which is a barbarous combination of old Norman-French with bastard Latin. He wrote it out, in an effort to divert the poor soul’s mind for a few moments. “Que est ceo a nous? Il est mieulx qu’il soit tout defait, que la ley soit chaunge pur luy.”

XIII

Cornelia insisted that she had to see the Governor once more, to plead with him for mercy. Even granting the worst, these men had been on the rack for seven years, and surely that was punishment! Henry said that would not get her very far; Fuller was a Roman senator, he believed in a life for a life. He had not pardoned a single man during his two terms as governor, and he had shortened only one sentence. But Cornelia, being a very old lady, was entitled under the Boston law to have her way; so Henry called up and made an appointment for her the next morning, and promised to come take her.

A great crowd in front of the State House, more picketing having been announced. Policemen so plentiful, they could have touched hands all the way along the front of the great building. Much scrutiny of those who came into the building--but Cornelia and Henry being obviously of the ruling caste, the guards took one glance and passed them on. Crowds of people in the corridors outside the executive chambers, reporters hungry as a shoal of fish; but etiquette of course forbade the old lady and her escort to talk to them. They were escorted into an inner office to wait.

The Governor’s time was given up entirely to the hearing of pleas. People came in groups, every sort--lawyers, clergymen, social workers, labor leaders, writers--he saw them, and took pleasure in putting to each lot his string of “posers”: Did you attend the trials? Have you read the record? Have you talked with the witnesses? Then what do you know about the case? When they set out to tell what they knew, he would not always listen. Said Arthur Garfield Hays, attorney from New York: “I wish to talk to you about the Department of Justice files.” Said the Governor: “Who wrote that editorial in the World?”

Cornelia was escorted to her seat in the torture-chair, and the automatic smile and the cold agate eyes were fixed upon her. Other eyes also: Mr. Joseph Wiggin, the Governor’s personal attorney, and Attorney-General Reading, and another lawyer. They never left him alone now, there must be witnesses to every word he said, and expert football players to employ what was known as “interference”--jumping in and protecting him, to keep him from revealing his ignorance about the case.

It was as Henry had said--he was a Roman senator, and did not want to talk about mercy. He wanted to pin this old lady down, and vent his exasperation at the trouble she had caused him. He did not say in so many words that she was to blame for all the lunatics carrying placards outside on the street, but that was the meaning of his attitude. Since his decision had been announced, he no longer had to pose as open-minded; he might be the bitter advocate, asking questions, and not paying any attention to her answers. “If Vanzetti was an innocent man, why didn’t he take the stand at Plymouth? Why leave his alibi to a twelve-year-old boy?”

“He produced eighteen alibi witnesses, Governor, and he could have got more if his lawyers had worked. We have found a dozen since.”

“If Sacco and Vanzetti were good men as you say, why were they intimate with a man like Boda?”

“But what have you against Boda, Governor?”

“I have sources of information, Mrs. Thornwell.”

“Boda was brought into the trial, and even Judge Thayer had to throw him out. They dragged in all that tale about the Coacci shed, and about Boda’s little Overland car--on purpose to make the jury think they had a bandit-gang--”

“I don’t understand you, Mrs. Thornwell; there is nothing in the record about Boda’s Overland car.”

“Why, Governor, of course it is there! I heard it in court, and I have read it a hundred times.”

“You are mistaken, I am certain.” It was a great man speaking. “Wiggin, is there anything in the record about Boda’s Overland car?”

“Nothing, Governor, that I have ever seen.”

What could Cornelia say? She could challenge him, of course, demand the record, and show him; or she could offer to send him the citation in a couple of hours. But what effect would it have, except to annoy him? Several persons had had this same experience, and had told her about it. Three times in the course of a brief interview, Cornelia would have to let him make incorrect assertions about the record. She must be tactful, and try to keep him smiling; for he was a man, and a Roman, and he did not like women butting in, arguing, correcting. Woman’s place was the home!

XIV

The salesman of motor-cars rested upon the authority of greater minds than his own. “Mrs. Thornwell, I appointed a commission to investigate this case, and I assure you, if a single one of those gentlemen had thought there was a doubt of the men’s guilt, I would not have taken this stand. But here you have three impartial referees--”

“Judge Grant had expressed a belief in their guilt before you appointed him, Governor.”

“I have heard that gossip, but you should not repeat such a thing unless you know it to be true.”

“But Judge Grant has written his opinion of Italians--he practically called them a nation of pickpockets.”

“Where do you get that? I never heard such a tale!”

“I have the book upon my table at home, Governor, and I will send it to you if you wish.”

But what he wished was to change the subject quickly. “I have had witnesses coming to this room for two months--person after person, assuring me of their identifications--”

“But Governor, even Judge Thayer had to throw out the identification testimony before he got through with this case!”

“What do you mean--throw it out?”

“I thought you had studied Judge Thayer’s decisions. In his 1924 decision he said: ‘These verdicts did not rest, in my judgment, upon the testimony of the eye-witnesses.’”

“What did he say they rested upon?”

“Upon the consciousness of guilt.” So then the Governor hastened to talk about the consciousness of guilt. Sacco and Vanzetti had lied when they were arrested, and they had lied on the stand, and their lies were manifest and had been exposed, so that no sensible person would dispute them.

“Granting your argument, Governor--”

“So you are prepared to admit that there was perjury in the case?”

“I am trying to find out where the argument leads us. If both sides made up testimony--and certainly we know that there was a great deal of it on the side of the prosecution--”

“I don’t know anything of the sort, Mrs. Thornwell.”

“You must know that Erastus Corning Whitney perjured himself.”

“Erastus what? I never heard of any such witness. Do you know of any such, Wiggin?”

Cornelia broke in. “Pardon me, Governor, I was not setting a trap for you. Erastus Corning Whitney is the real name of the man who took the stand and swore that his name was Carlos E. Goodridge, and thereby manifestly perjured himself. So, as I say, if we assume perjury on both sides--”

“Then we can say that one cancels the other.”

“Pardon me if I point out the fallacy, Governor. To begin with, the prosecution has to establish a case. When you wipe out the witnesses of the prosecution, one by one, as we have done by our new evidence, there is no case left, and under the law the men are innocent--quite regardless of whether some of their Italian friends may have taken the stand and made false alibis for them.”

“Why should innocent people have to be defended by perjury, Mrs. Thornwell?”

“For only one reason that I know, Governor--that they know positively the other side is preparing a perjured case against them. We have established that, but we have never had any judgment upon it, except that of Judge Thayer.”

One of the lawyers here considered it advisable to justify the high fees which the Governor was paying him out of his private purse to sit day by day and listen to these wrangles. “Mrs. Thornwell,” he interposed, “you overlook the fact that the Supreme Judicial Court has passed upon Judge Thayer’s rulings. As good citizens, we must have some belief in the competence and disinterestedness of our highest court.”

Cornelia turned her brown eyes upon him. These eyes had somehow lost their softness, and had a sparkle that might be malice. “Are you going to advance that doctrine in your new brief on the Jerry Walker case?”

“My God!” thought the legal gentleman, and it took all his blue-blood inheritance and Harvard training to keep his annoyance from showing on his face. He relapsed into dignified silence, and pretended not to see the look of mischief which his enemy Henry Cabot Winters shot at him. Truly a comical situation: This gentleman, who was counsel for the Governor in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, also was one of the counsel for Jerry Walker, and was on the point of filing before the Supreme Court of the United States an application for a writ of certiorari, to take that case away from the highest court of Massachusetts and reverse its decision. In that application the lawyer and his associates were going to make the most outrageous charges--implying that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had become a “house of refuge for the rich and powerful,” and declaring flatly that the judgment of the Full Court was “made in bad faith,” and that “there is nothing more odious than judicial favoritism,” which in this case had been “exercised in favor of bankers.” A marvelous thing, that flexibility of the legal mind, which can hold two diametrically opposite opinions at the same time; sorting out truth and error into two baskets, as it were, and carrying both to market, one in the right hand and one in the left!

But it didn’t do Cornelia a bit of good to score points like that; it only made these gentlemen hate her. She must swallow her indignation, and come back to beg for mercy. “Remember, Governor, you must be sure. You are doing something that can never be undone. There is an old saying--I don’t know who is the author--that ‘only an infallible judge should pass an immutable sentence.’”

“Do you know that those men are innocent, Mrs. Thornwell?”

“Of course I don’t know that; how could I know it--unless I had been with them at the time? But I have been studying the case for seven years, and I believe that they are innocent, and certainly I know this--that they have not been proved guilty. I know all that I need to know--that they did not have a fair trial.”

“Well,” said the Governor, “I know that they are guilty, so I don’t care whether they had a fair trial or not.”

Cornelia stared at him; she was so taken aback by the remark that she could hardly believe she had heard it. “You know they are guilty, Governor Fuller?”

“I know it.”

“But how can you know it, unless there was a fair trial--somewhere, somehow--to establish it?”

“I have sources of information, Mrs. Thornwell, which I am not at liberty to reveal. You should find out what the Italian colony thinks about this case.”

“Governor, what are you saying? Some one has come and whispered into your ear, and you have been willing to believe it!”

“You cannot expect witnesses to tell all they know in the face of such peril as has been created in this community, Mrs. Thornwell.”

“So then, it is exactly as Vanzetti said to me--for weeks he has been saying it: ‘We are being murdered by the whispers of unknown men!’ Boston has gone back to the days of Russia under the tsars, of Turkey under the sultans, of China under the mandarins! Spies come and whisper secrets, and our rulers execute men upon words which they cannot or dare not produce in open court!”

One of the lawyers thought he had better justify his fees again. “Surely it is not quite so bad as that, Mrs. Thornwell--”

“It is so bad that it cannot be worse! And I implore you, Governor Fuller--consider, before you take this fatal step, which will blast the rest of your life! You are executing men upon secret testimony--but I tell you, the world will insist upon knowing what that testimony is! History will never let you alone until you tell what it is! And when mankind has learned that it was the whispers of spies--the gossip of what you are pleased to call ‘the Italian colony’--then you will face such a blast of indignation as no man can face and live!”

After that they did not want to listen to her any more. After that she was a distracted old woman who had fallen under the influence of sinister “Reds,” and lost entirely her mental balance. All they desired was to keep her from wasting the time of a busy and important public man. They would be polite, of course--even in Russia and Turkey and China the high officials were doubtless polite to old ladies of the ruling caste. “Glad to have seen you again, Mrs. Thornwell. I will give my best consideration to what you have said.” So Cornelia made her way out through the crowds, with tears in her eyes for all the newspapermen to see and report.

“Henry,” she asked, when they had got by themselves, “what can those whispers be?”

Said the lawyer, “There’s a man in that State House crowd who will talk with me, and I’ll see if I can find out.”

XVI

Michael Angelo Musmanno was in Washington, haunting the empty chambers of the United States Supreme Court. The justices were on vacation, but he lodged in the office of the clerk the two appeals from the Massachusetts courts. He entered the formal appearance of Hill and himself, paid the docketing fees, and the only thing remaining to perfect the appeals was the record of the case, which the clerk of the Dedham court had promised to send but which had not yet arrived. This was later secured, and duly filed.

But this procedure did not of itself postpone the execution, and Monday midnight was the hour set. Would any judge order a stay of execution? The lawyers were rushing to this one and that; it was a free-lance matter now, every man for himself--but still they found time to form opinions of one another. The Boston lawyers thought they knew Boston; they were conservative, and did things in a dignified manner, and held newspaper reporters off at the end of a ten-foot pole. The New Yorkers, on the other hand, were radicals, fighting in the open, and welcoming the reporters as allies. They accused the Boston crowd of being jealous about the case--“acting like a bunch of prima donnas!” said one.

Also among the committee, the frantic last-hour antagonisms between those who wanted to save Sacco and Vanzetti as human beings, and those who wanted to make them into symbols of the class war. Hardly a telegram could be sent, or a statement given to the press, that did not involve the controversy. The differences of ideas had become embodied in personal antagonisms. The communists were collecting sums of money for the defense, and the committee charged that this money was not coming to them, but was being used for communist propaganda. The communists replied with charges that the committee was wasting its funds upon high fees to capitalist lawyers. Charges and counter-charges--to the great glee of the enemy. The whispering gallery which was the State House buzzed and hummed with gossip. The spies came running, and the Governor’s advisers were on tip-toe. “What are they doing now? What do they say about this? About that?”

The “New York nuts” organized another “death march.” This time it was led by Captain Paxton Hibben, diplomat, war correspondent, and army officer; dapper, erect, and with sharp little military mustaches. He knew all about marches and parades, of course, and Boston knew him because the Transcript had slandered him and then had to retract and apologize. Hibben was a Harvard master of arts, and with him came Dos Passos and Hapgood, bachelors of arts, and therefore subordinates; also James Rorty, the poet; and Clarina Michelson, from Greenwich Village, a tireless soul who did the hard work; and several humble wage-earners with names never heard before on Beacon Street. They marched their allotted time--one-two-three-four-five-six-seven--with a captain of police holding a watch on them; then they were led off under escort, with the crowd hooting, and a few cheering.

At the corner of Joy Street, Captain Hibben, being in advance, commanded, sharply, “Files right!” The huge police sergeant who had him in charge looked at him, and said, “Were you in the service?” The answer was, “I was a captain in the 332nd Field Artillery in France.” “Well, Captain,” said the sergeant, “this is a strange place for you to be!” “If you knew as much about Boston as I do, you would be with me,” said Hibben; and in the old Joy Street police station, so oddly named, they had a chat. Hibben had more than one man’s share of adventures to tell; he had been second secretary in the American legation in old St. Petersburg, he had been a war correspondent in the Near East in the early days of the war, and secretary of the Russian Red Cross for the Bolsheviks; a Chevalier of the Order of St. Stanislaus (Russian), an Officer of the Order of the Redeemer (Greek), and of the Order of the Sacred Treasure (Japan). “Holy smoke!” said the police sergeant; and on Monday morning in court he was wholly unable to remember that he had seen this starred and beribboned diplomat on the picket-line, and so Hibben was discharged. The sergeant meant it for a favor, but it was a cause of vexation to the prisoner, who had prepared a ringing statement to read in court--and now it was a dud!

XVII

The three condemned men--Madeiros always with them!--had been moved back into the death-house; into the three little cells with clean, smooth white-tiled floors, and doors that were never opened--no guard ever entered and no prisoner ever came out, except to die. Six feet in front of the cells ran a painted line, beyond which no visitor was permitted to step; at least, it had never yet happened in the history of Massachusetts, which lives by precedent.

But now Luigia Vanzetti arrived in Boston, followed by a stream of reporters, eager to make the most of this human interest story--“sob stuff” is the technical name. A frail, pathetic woman, weighing not more than a hundred pounds, and looking for all the world like a New England school teacher--she was coming to the prison to meet her brother, whom she had not seen since he was a youth. She had come all the way from Villafalletto to help him die, and naturally she would wish to step over the painted line and clasp him in her arms. To obtain this favor all the eloquence of the ladies of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense was concentrated upon Warden Hendry. They came to his office and wept, and prayed, and stormed and scolded, until at last the Commonwealth of Massachusetts broke a precedent, for the first time in its three hundred years of history.

Bart was led out from his cell, and allowed to sit in a chair on the other side of the painted line. The warden himself brought Luigia, and two guards stood by to see that she did not give the condemned man any poison, or a revolver, or an Italian stiletto. They tottered into each other’s arms, sobbing; and in a moment more the woman collapsed, and one guard had to catch her, while the other brought a chair. Bart sat, patting her gently, and for an hour they talked about all the things which might interest a brother and sister who had parted in their teens, and met again in their middle thirties, with only two days more of life upon earth together.

The twelve-year-old Dante Sacco had come with Rosina and paid a last visit to his father; a terrible ordeal for a child, to pass that canvas-shrouded death-chair, and sit listening to a faint voice, and peering at a wasted shadow of a man through narrow steel bars which must not be approached. The boy and the mother went out sobbing, the latter hardly able to walk; each one of these visits was like a spell of illness to her. The father set himself to his last task, of writing the promised letter to the “bimbo”; to leave him some permanent message which he might study when he grew older. Pitiful, rambling words of a man trying to hold his faculties in the midst of torment, and to write in a foreign language--because the “bimbo” spoke that language, and was going to an American school. “Much I thought of you,” wrote the father, “when I was lying in the death-house--the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground, where there was all the life and the joy of liberty--just one step from the wall which contains the buried agony of three buried souls.... Yes, Dante, they can crucify our bodies to-day as they are doing but they cannot destroy our ideals that will remain for the youth of the future to come....

“Well, my dear boy, after your mother had talked to me so much and I had dreamed of you day and night, how joyful it was to see you at last. To have talked with you like we used to in the days--in those days. Much I told you on that visit and more I wanted to say, but I saw that you will remain the same affectionate boy, faithful to your mother who loves you so much, and I did not want to hurt your sensibilities any longer, because I am sure that you will continue to be the same boy and remember what I have told you. I knew that and what here I am going to tell you will touch your feelings, but don’t cry, Dante, because many tears have been wasted, as your mother’s have been wasted for seven years, and never did any good.”

XVIII

The Great Novelist who makes up history had brought it about that while Sacco and Vanzetti were lying in the death-cells, there preceded them to the land of shadows a great American lord of steel and finance: Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive of the United States Steel Corporation, with resources of two billions of dollars. A great Christian he had been, helping to build that mighty university of Methodism from which Dean Wigless had assailed Felix Frankfurter; holder of eight honorary degrees from church universities--the most pious plutocrat who ever split his strikers’ skulls and set thousands of spies to cow their souls. Before he left for his mansion above, he also wrote a message to his beloved ones, giving his vade mecum as a follower of the gentle Jesus. His last will and testament it was, and all the capitalist newspapers of America featured his exalted words:

“I earnestly request my wife and children and descendants that they steadfastly decline to sign any bonds or obligations of any kind as surety for any other person, or persons; that they refuse to make any loans except on the basis of first-class, well-known securities, and that they invariably decline to invest in any untried or doubtful securities or property or enterprise or business.”

At this same time two anarchist wops, one of them an avowed atheist, the other a vague deist of the old-fashioned sort, were writing their last words to their beloved ones, and these words also were published. Said Nicola Sacco, with one foot in eternity:

“So, Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the gentle tranquillity of the mother nature, and I am sure that she will enjoy this very much, as you surely would be happy for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends, they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy and freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”

Also Vanzetti left his message for Dante to study in after years. One day before he died he wrote a letter to a little boy whose school friends jeered him because he was the son of a murderer. Said Bart:

“I tell you all this now, for I know well your father, he is not a criminal, but one of the bravest men I ever knew. Some day you will understand what I am about to tell you, that your father has sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for his faith in liberty and justice for all. That day you will be proud of your father, and if you become brave enough, you will take his place in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and you will vindicate his name and our blood.

“Remember and know also, Dante, that if your father and I would have been cowards and hypocrites and renegades of our faith, we would not have been put to death. They would not even have convicted a leprous dog; not even executed a deadly poisonous scorpion on such evidence as that they framed against us. They would have given a new trial to a matricide and habitual felon on the evidence we presented for a new trial.

“Remember, Dante, remember always these things: We are not criminals; they convicted us on a frame-up; they denied us a new trial; and if we will be executed after seven years, three months and seventeen days of unspeakable tortures and wrongs, it is for what I have already told you; because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of man by man.”

XIX. ACADEMIC AUTOCRACY…

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