XXII. THE CITY OF FEAR
I
“This is our career and our triumph,” Bart had proclaimed; and assuredly never had “a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler” caused such excitement in the world. On Saturday, two days before the execution, there was an order for a general strike in Buenos Ayres; in Berlin a protest from the trade unions, and the first radical meeting ever held in the former House of Lords of the Kingdom of Prussia; in London a mob of ten thousand in front of the American embassy; in Geneva a call for the boycotting of American goods; in Russia enormous protest meetings in every city; in Paris a hundred thousand workers parading, carrying red flags and huge placards denouncing American justice; tourists being greeted with shouts from thousands of throats, “Pardon! Pardon!”--and as a rule finding it prudent to reply, “Vive Sacco et Vanzetti!” The workers were bewildered by the spectacle of Puritan severity, and helpless in the face of it. Pierre Leon, editing a French communist paper, cabled to Joe Randall: “What can we do?” Joe’s answer was: “Repudiate the debts.” But that, alas, was not an immediate program; the best the French could do was to fail to pay them.
Only in Massachusetts itself was silence. Boston under the iron heel, and civil rights subject to revocation. One simple rule, easy for all to understand: do what the police tell you and keep your mouth shut. Superintendent Crowley had requested the mayor to cancel all the eighteen speaking permits on the Common, and thus free speech was dumped out of the “cradle of liberty.” The defense committee was trying to hire a hall for a last minute protest-meeting, but the police made a round of the halls and warned the owners; if they rented to the Reds, they would lose their license. It was a trick which “Mickey the Gunman” had been working for several years; by means of it he had suppressed a young Lithuanian named Bimba, who proclaimed himself an atheist, and annoyed the Catholic priests. The police would close up halls, on the ground that they violated fire ordinances; something which, in an old city like Boston, a great many buildings did.
At the last minute the defense committee succeeded in finding a hall, and on Saturday evening a pitiful meeting was held, with almost as many “cops” as audience. A speaker started to describe what was going to happen in Charlestown prison on Monday midnight, and a police official stepped forward, saying, “No more of that, or we’ll shut you up.” So the orators discussed the case in abstract terms, not saying anything rude about governors or college presidents, nor using bad words like “anarchistic bastards.” Paxton Hibben spoke, military and incisive; Powers Hapgood, fiery and determined; Alfred Baker Lewis, who seemed like a big but very serious boy; then Betty Alvin, for the Back Bay; and--miracle of miracles--a Catholic lifting his voice for two infidels! The members of the Boston police force rubbed their eyes as the Reverend Francis Xavier Regan took the platform, and told the story of Caleb Cunningham, the wealthy resident of Milton who had shot and killed the Swede, John Johnson, for cutting wood on his land, and had been so considerately treated by the authorities of Norfolk County. One Catholic remembered the humble origins of his Church--even in the diocese of His Eminence, “Big Bill”!
A call had been issued for labor union delegates to meet on that same Saturday evening, to consider plans for a general strike. Since it was manifestly too late, the police did not interfere. About fifty workers attended, mostly from the Italian barbers and the Jewish needle trades; the American workers present might have been counted on the fingers of one hand. The American workers were out on the roads in second-hand cars with their families, eating hot-dogs and drinking soda-pop; they were at the movies, watching poor girls marry millionaires and poor boys make fortunes overnight; they were shooting craps and playing poker and drinking home brew. Assuredly they were not out on the streets, getting their heads broken for any wops.
Michael Gold went about listening, and reporting public sentiment in Boston. A young sailor prowling in Scollay Square, on the hunt for women: “They ought to be burned; they insulted the flag.” A clerk drinking ice cream soda at a fountain: “All them Italians look like murderers to me.” A timid little groceryman expressing himself over the counter: “Yes, maybe they are innocent, but we gotta bump ’em off, or we’ll all be bombed in our beds.” A telephone girl, hearing an Italian voice complaining of a wrong number: “Aw shut up, you Guinney rat, wait till you see what we do to you on August 22nd!”
All this they had got out of their newspapers, of course. For a brief time there had been a break in newspaper solidarity regarding the Sacco-Vanzetti case; an editorial writer of the Herald had won the Pulitzer prize of 1926 for an editorial demanding a new trial. But now his voice was silent. The department-stores were clamoring to have an end to the public anxiety; business had fallen off, because women, who do most of the shopping, were afraid to go about. The only industry which was thriving was that of riot and bomb insurance; the companies wrote it to the amount of eight hundred million dollars, and didn’t have to pay one cent! A net profit of a cool million to the companies, and a corresponding loss to Boston merchants. Preposterous that two wops should cause such trouble! The newspapers, which thrive upon department-store advertising, made one sweet harmony: “Stand by the Governor and the courts.” In the profession, Boston was known as “the poor-house of journalism.”
II
Cornelia, splashing around frantically for a straw to catch hold of, bethought herself of Cardinal O’Connell. Luigia Vanzetti was a faithful daughter of the church, and a pitiful figure; perhaps she might be able to tempt the great man into making an appeal for clemency. So Jessica Henderson came with her limousine, always there to help the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and they drove the anxious, fearful little woman out to the summer home of the great prelate at Marblehead. He was on the lawn with his dog when the party arrived, and Mrs. Henderson’s daughter went to ask if he would see Luigia. “Bless her heart, of course,” he said.
He was cordial, charming, as he knew how to be when it was worth while. He served tea himself, and remarked to Cornelia, “It may be a long time before you have a cardinal pouring tea for you again.” He chatted with Luigia in Italian, and Cornelia could understand enough to know that he was sympathizing greatly, and doing nothing. Afterwards he wrote and gave to the papers a statement on the subject which was a masterpiece of diplomatic piety: “Human judgment is fallible at best.... But the judgment of God is perfect and in the end He and His ways, mysterious as they are, are our hope and salvation.” Said the sarcastic Betty: “Now we know why God was invented--so that princes of the church may dodge their moral responsibilities!”
Futile to try to make headway in Boston, with the weight of such authority against you! The local liberals were hamstrung by the Lowell report. If Mr. Lowell said it, it must be so, and who are we to set ourselves up against him? Likewise Bishop Lawrence had clambered onto the bandwagon. Having asked the Governor to appoint an impartial commission, he now accepted the impartial decision, and commended the Governor for his firmness and courage. He did this in a letter, which appeared in the press.
There they stood, the three intellectual and spiritual guides of Boston: the Cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the President of Harvard University. When a stranger inquired concerning them, he was struck by a curious fact: the first statement about any one of the three would be that he was an efficient administrator of enormous properties. This was not his fault, of course; the properties were there, and must be administered; but the automatic effect was this, that if you were to go to any one of the three administrators, and make a remark suggesting that he should act upon the creed he taught, he would begin to watch you to see whether you were the dangerous kind.
The Cardinal of the Catholics was exiling rebellious spirits to the backwoods, and raising up a generation of young clerics who were at once preachers, politicians, and real estate experts; you could know when one of them was in favor by the fact that his mother and father, brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, moved immediately into expensive residences. As for the Bishop of the Blue-bloods, he had a father who helped to finance John Brown’s expedition to fight slavery in Kansas; the son was known as the best money-raiser in New England, and had turned his vast organization into a school of social propriety. When it was a question of a blue-blood church official accused of undue intimacy with choir-boys, you would see this well-bred bishop as anxious to have the law not enforced as he was to have it enforced against anarchist wops.
As for President Lowell, he would boast that every professor in his great institution enjoyed complete freedom of speech, and when some one asked him how he could manage anything so dangerous, he would smile and say that it was easy if you were careful whom you allowed to become a professor. When it chanced that a Harvard lecturer dared to attack the electric light and power interests, whose directors and bankers compose the governing body of the university, President Lowell would “fire” him, and incidentally lie to him, with exactly the same heartiness as a “wop” standing by a friend accused of banditry, or a blue-blood banker trying to save fifteen million dollars.
III
Bugles in the streets; a regiment of the state militia marching, with grim set faces--the answer of the Commonwealth to the challenge of anarchy. Airplanes flying overhead, watching for bombers in the sky. Military squads on duty at every public building, suspicious of every foreign face, and now and then stopping a passerby to search a bundle or open a suitcase. Every policeman on twenty-four hour duty again; sitting in the station-houses, and now and then called out for a wild ride or a gallop, on account of a bomb-scare. The firemen also on twenty-four hour duty, and all armed. The American Legion mobilized to guard the homes of the rich and the great. Every judge, juror, prosecutor, witness, or official who had ever had anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case was being protected, and there was no foolishness about the protection.
A man hopped out of an automobile at the home of President Lowell, and started towards the rear entrance, carrying a heavy black bag. They did not stop to ask him who he was or what he wanted, they hit him over the head and laid him out--and then ascertained that he was delivering a load of that heavy aluminum ware which is the latest fad in fancy cookery for the rich. A young Catholic priest stepped off the train in South Station, arriving from the west for a holiday; he went to the information bureau and said, “Will you please tell me the way to the State House?” “Certainly,” replied the clerk, and called a policeman, saying, “This man wants to know the way to the State House.” The kind-hearted policeman said he would escort him, and led him to a patrol-wagon, and drove him to the nearest station-house, where they held him “incommunicado” for twenty-four hours.
The great Commonwealth had told ten thousand lies; and now for every lie there was a club and a bayonet. If you wished to oppose the lies, there was just one way--put your head under the crashing clubs, throw your body onto the gleaming bayonets. This was not merely the law of Massachusetts, this was the law of life, the way by which lies have been killed throughout history. The friends of the defense confronted this crisis, and either went forward and took the punishment, or shrunk back and sneaked away with a whole skin and a damaged conscience.
Terrible scenes in the Thornwell family. In “Hillview,” Great-uncle Abner storming, because the Governor had been browbeaten once, and might yield again; Abner declared that he would wheel himself all the way to Boston, thirty miles or so on the public highway, and present himself at the Governor’s office to demand the death of the two anarchists. On the other hand, in the tenement on the north side of Beacon Hill was Deborah pleading and praying to her daughter, not to throw away her life, not to disgrace herself and her innocent and helpless family.
Cornelia was not going to get arrested; she was motoring with Mrs. Henderson to make an appeal to Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court. But Betty had pledged herself to carry a placard on the Common, and Joe also. They had sent out a call for a thousand demonstrators, and at least two were going to respond. Nothing that Deborah could say would have any effect; no tears, no prayers. “They are surely going to arrest me once,” said Betty, and laughed, a trifle hysterically. “They are not going to murder Bart and Nick without arresting me at least once!” When Deborah brought in the sacred names of little Rupert Alvin Thornwell Randall, the unnatural mother made reply: “The best thing that could happen to him would be for me and Joe to be clubbed to death, so that you and Father could raise him to be respectable!”
That was late Saturday night, after the meeting in Scenic Auditorium. Deborah stayed in town that night, and telephoned to Rupert, who gave up a service in his new private chapel, the joy of his life, to come and add the immense weight of his authority. But Betty did not even wait to see him; she went off to a gathering of the “New York nuts,” who were making cardboard signs to wear while undergoing martyrdom. Her Uncle James Scatterbridge came upon her in the lobby of the Hotel Bellevue--most fashionable of hostelries, adjoining the State House, where a group of the leisure class “nuts” had made their headquarters, to the great dismay of the management.
Uncle James came there, with blood in his eye, looking for his Josiah, intending to take him captive by force if necessary. But James’s Josiah was hiding, and when his father actually found him, he was walking on the outskirts of the Common, with a policeman holding each arm, and a jeering crowd all around. James pushed his way through and took charge, to the relief of the “cops,” who had been told to make as few arrests as possible. There followed painful hours for both father and son; but do not worry too much, for it will turn out happily in the end--the great cotton-master will be able to keep his son’s name out of the papers, and also be able to make his Josiah into a mildly successful young business man. They will look back on this adventure some day, and the older will be secretly rather proud of the younger’s nerve. “A damned fool, of course; but then, we’re all damned fools when we’re young.”
IV
Boston Common is an irregularly shaped park, comprising, with the Public Gardens, about a square mile. It is laid out with rambling paths, and has a Monument Hill, with cannon and other trophies; there are greenswards, groups of trees, a band-stand with benches, the “Frog Pond,” and in the Public Gardens a little lake for boats. The State House with the golden dome overlooks it from one corner; the Park Street Church, the Union Club, and many of the homes of the old families on Beacon Street. On the other side is Tremont Street, with the fashionable shops; and from the end of the Public Gardens starts Commonwealth Avenue, where the Alvins lived. All very fashionable, in a dignified way, mixed up with history and tradition, taking itself seriously. In the old days, this Common had been the place where the villagers pastured their cows; now it was a place for nursemaids to flirt with sailors from the ships, and for out-of-works to study the “help wanted” ads in the newspapers. On Sunday afternoons all the religious cranks, the holy rollers and the Salvation Army, shouted under the trees along the mall; also the atheists and the socialists and the single taxers, and those who refuse to believe that the earth is round.
But this Sunday, August 21st, all that was off, and for a year to come. There was a band concert and a radio concert to keep the crowds occupied; also two ball-games, and two impromptu dog-fights. Twenty-five thousand people came--having read in the papers that some new-style martyrs were going to feed themselves to the lions.
One thousand had been called for, and fourteen came. The lawyers were in part responsible for that, having strenuously urged against it. The demonstrators would be sure to get their heads clubbed, and could only do harm to the case by cheap notoriety. Those who were troubled by the former consideration were glad to have the latter for an excuse. The few stubborn ones who insisted upon coming were troubled by both considerations, but of course would only admit the latter. They brought little rolls of cardboard, printed with Sacco-Vanzetti protests, to wear over their shoulders, and made their rendezvous in a corner drug-store, eyed suspiciously by the proprietor, because they looked fidgety and queer, not at all “Boston.” The job had fallen mostly to the “New York nuts.”
There was John Dos Passos, faithful son of Harvard, and John Howard Lawson, another one of the “New Playwrights” from Greenwich Village. There was Clarina Michelson, ready to do the hard work again, and William Patterson, a Negro lawyer from New York, running the greatest risk of any of them, with his black face not to be disguised. Just up Beacon Street was the Shaw Monument, with figures in perennial bronze, of unmistakable Negro boys in uniform, led by a young Boston blue-blood on horseback; no doubt Patterson had looked at this, and drawn courage from it. To uphold the high traditions of the city, there came Betty Alvin and Joe Randall, considered a Bostonian-in-law; also James’s Josiah, more scared of his father than of the police; and Margaret Hatfield, whose father was a prominent Republican, treasurer of Middlesex county. Margaret had taken the precaution to “dress the part,” so she was safe, though she couldn’t be sure of it. Her mother was behaving exactly like Betty’s mother, wandering about the Common twisting her hands together, and moaning to herself, “Oh, why do they have to do it?”
V
“Come on, you sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?” So, according to army tradition, a sergeant shouted to a squad, going “over the top” in the Argonne forest. It is an idea which, with or without the language, has animated martyrs through the ages. They have walked to the lions, they have walked to the stake and the gallows and the guillotine, and other forms of terror; now they walked to the clubs and the bayonets--a little group from the corner drug-store, quaking inside, and trembling in the knees, but setting their teeth and holding their heads high. As it happened, none was to be seriously hurt, but they could not know that; pain is pain, and a cracked skull, or the hoofs of horses in your stomach, are as unpleasant as any other form. Come on, you New York nuts, do you want to live forever?
The Common stretching before them. The mall, where the speaking should have been, is closed by a cordon of police; no use to try it there. They get out on the concrete walk, and then look at one another anxiously. Are they in a good place, among the crowd? Some one says yes, and with trembling fingers they unroll the placards and put them over their shoulders. The bystanders see, and cheers go up. Crowds begin to gather; they have been wandering about, waiting for something to happen, and here it is! “Hurrah for Sacco and Vanzetti!” “Save Sacco and Vanzetti!” At once a counter demonstration: “Down with the Reds! Lynch them!”
The little band of martyrs walk on, seeing nothing, hearing nothing; a trifle dizzy with the excitement--that rare mood of martyrdom, more wonderful than drunkenness. You walk upon the air, into the clouds; the earth and the limitations of the flesh no longer exist; you have transcended them all, you belong to the ages, you speak to God. “Wir sind all des Todes eigen,” sings the German poet--“we all belong to death.” We have seen such wickedness upon earth that we choose rather to die than to let it prevail.
“All right,” says the world, “if you want to die, we are willing!” The lions roar; if you want to be eaten, their stomachs are made for the purpose! Here come the police, clubs drawn. “Enough of that now! Take off those signs and get out of here!” They try to grab the signs, and the marchers dodge this way and that, to protect them as long as possible; bystanders grab at the signs, others try to block the way of the “cops.” The clubs begin to fall; a disagreeable sound, the thud of hickory on human flesh and bone.
Here come the mounted men, riding through the throngs. “Look out for yourself!” Women shriek; the horses charge straight ahead, knocking people down. A strange experience for a daughter of the best families--Betty can hardly believe it; she thinks the horse will swerve at the last moment; then she realizes that the rider means to run her down, and she leaps too late, the shoulder of the passing horse strikes her and sends her spinning.
The trooper speeds on; he has spied the black face, and wants that most of all. The Negro runs, and the rider rears the front feet of his steed, intending to strike him down with the iron-shod hoofs. But fortunately there is a tree, and the Negro leaps behind it; a man can run round a tree faster than the best-trained police-mount--the dapper and genial William Patterson proves it by making five complete circuits before he runs into the arms of an ordinary cop, who grabs him by the collar and tears off his sign and tramples it in the dirt, and then starts to march him away. “Well,” he remarks, sociably, “this is the first time I ever see a nigger bastard that was a communist.” The lawyer is surprised, because he has been given to understand that that particular bad word is barred from the Common; Mike Crowley was so shocked, two weeks ago, when Mary Donovan tacked up a sign to a tree: “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” But apparently the police do not have to obey their own laws.
The “Black Maria” is in readiness, and comes with clanging bell, and the prisoners are loaded into it--all but the “nigger bastard.” He has to be walked to the police-station--because it would not be decent for him to ride in the same patrol-wagon with his friend Clarina Michelson! The others are driven off--and when they get to the La Grange Street station-house and compare notes, they discover that they have lost their blue-bloods! Betty is missing, and her husband, and her cousin Josiah! Margaret Hatfield is missing! Even in the midst of that excitement, the police have found time to consult the “social register”! A little later they turn loose John Dos Passos--no Harvard graduates wanted! The only ones they arrest are five workers, two named Sansevrion, one Schulman, one Amari, and that Cosimo Carvotta against whom they have a special grudge, on account of having lied about him in the police court after the previous Sunday’s arrests.
VI
In the La Grange Street station they found Paula Holladay, waiting for some company. No story of that last Sunday would be complete without the Odyssey of Paula, who had made a parade all by herself--and a long one! She was the founder of “Polly’s,” a Greenwich Village café renowned in song and story; that summer she had been running a restaurant in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. Her conscience began to gnaw at her, and she decided to do what one woman could to express a sense of injustice. She turned her business over to a friend, and put on a sign reading, “Is justice dead? Save Sacco and Vanzetti,” and set out to walk from Provincetown to Boston, a distance, as the “nut” walks, of a hundred and twenty-five miles.
Now and then on the route, women working in their gardens would see that sign, and follow along on the other side of the picket-fence, saying, “I wish I had a shot-gun in the house, I’d show you what I’d do to you!” Ladies in automobiles would stop to express the same sentiment. But apparently the shotgun is an obsolete instrument in Massachusetts, for Paula reached Boston with a whole skin, except for a blister on the heel. She joined the other nuts, and learning that the police were destroying all banners and signs, she painted her message on a red “slicker,” or waterproof coat, and sallied forth onto the Common thus garbed.
She was passing the bandstand, when the first “cop” spied her, and took her in tow. A crowd gathered quickly, and there were waves of shouting, some for, some against. The policeman’s hand began to tremble on the woman’s arm. “Why are you so nervous?” she said--after which he managed to control himself. Another came to his aid, and then two mounted men, who kept her between them, safe. When she told them that she was determined to stay on the Common, they conducted her to the police-station. “What is the charge?” she demanded; the answer was, “Oh, never mind that, just lock her up.”
Presently came “Mike” Crowley, having kissed the Blarney stone that morning. “Now it would be too bad for a nice-looking young lady like you to get into any trouble that might get her on the books here.” The answer of Paula was, “I am neither so young nor so good-looking, and I am not afraid to get on the books. I want to know whether I am kept here by force without any charge.” When he wouldn’t answer, she said, “I will find out,” and started to leave; so then he put his hand upon her shoulder, and she was there by force. They kept her until evening, when there were no more crowds upon the Common, and no more harm to be done by the wearing of a red “slicker” with the question, “Is justice dead?”
VII
The lawyers were making another attempt to open the Department of Justice files, and they appealed to Governor Fuller for a respite until the documents could be studied. Arthur Hill asked also for time to permit the United States Supreme Court to consider his application. The Governor followed his usual policy of declining to say what he would do; so the lawyers were racing about from one country-place to another, trying to persuade some judge to order a stay. In those last hectic days they put the matter before a dozen different judges, representing the Superior Court and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and the District Courts and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Mr. Hill journeyed to see Justice Holmes at his place in Beverly, on the North Shore: Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the poet, eighty-six years of age, respected by all liberals, because he and Brandeis invariably wrote a minority opinion when the court made further restrictions upon human rights in the interest of privilege. The old gentleman now said that he did not think he had the power to interfere, but wished them luck with some other justice who might think differently. “Unofficially,” he said that Sacco and Vanzetti could not have got a fair trial in 1921.
They went to Louis Brandeis, their last hope. A Jewish lawyer of great ability, Brandeis had begun practice in Boston, and made a fortune early, and then turned against the system, and became an advocate of the public interest, and therefore one of the most hated men in the city. When Woodrow Wilson had named him for the Supreme Court bench, there had been a howl from State Street, and no voice louder than that of President Lowell of Harvard. Nevertheless, the radical Jew had got in; and now he had the greatest chance of his career--and missed it.
The Court was composed mainly of hard-boiled corporation lawyers, selected by President Taft--now the Chief Justice--and by Harding and Coolidge. Undoubtedly these men would have reversed any action that Brandeis might have taken; but at least it would have been a gesture, and a crown upon a great life. Cornelia spent Sunday afternoon arguing and pleading with the justice, but in vain; telegrams came raining upon him, in vain. He was bound, like all other judges. It so happened that Rosina Sacco had occupied a house belonging to Mrs. Brandeis in Dedham, and this constituted “prejudice.” The justice could not be persuaded that prejudice in favor of mercy was different from prejudice in favor of one interest against another. Vanzetti commented upon this singular situation in a letter to Harry Dana--almost the last words he wrote:
“So it is coming to pass that some justices repel our appeal because they are friendly with us, and other justices repel our appeal because they are hostile to us, and through this elegant Forche Caudine we are led straight to the electric chair.”
These nine elderly gentlemen who did the real governing of the United States were overworked, and in dread of taking more upon their bowed shoulders. They had the task of telling the American people what laws they might pass and what laws they might not pass; what their laws meant, or ought to mean; in short, what served the propertied classes, and what threatened them. An enormous task; and the old gentlemen contemplated with dismay the idea of opening the sluice-gates and letting in more work upon themselves.
They dealt with the law, they said, and never with the facts. But when there came an emergency where it seemed necessary to deal with facts, they would find a way to do it. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had just shown that in the Jerry Walker case, where the jury had decided the facts against the interest of the fellow club-members of the Court. The Court had stepped in and considered such facts as they pleased, and like all special pleaders they had stated the facts on their own side, and suppressed the facts on the other side. But in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti there were no vast sums of money at stake--only the lives of two wops. “It were better that you be ruined than that the law be changed for the likes of you!”
VIII
Cornelia came back to her apartment on Sunday evening, beaten and exhausted. Betty was over at defense headquarters, helping to organize the new arrivals and plan the last demonstration. Poets, writers, artists--all persons, old and young, with an urge to martyrdom--were pouring into Boston, and in front of the State House they would have their chance. Betty was lame from her effort to upset a horse, but was sticking to her desk; she had not been to bed the night before, and was not going to-night. “Plenty of time to sleep after Monday midnight,” she said. “Bart and Nick will keep us company.”
Joe was at the headquarters of the new “Citizens’ National Committee,” which was concentrating its efforts upon trying to persuade the Federal authorities to accept their responsibility in the case. The committee was sending and receiving hundreds of telegrams every day: obtaining signatures to a petition to the President of the United States, asking him to intervene, according to the precedent set by Woodrow Wilson, when the State of California had been on the point of executing Tom Mooney. But there was an important difference between the two cases; Mooney was an A. F. of L. man, and labor had to be handled gingerly in war-time. But now there was what capitalism calls “peace,” and Sacco and Vanzetti had no standing in the court of power-politics.
The President of the United States was that “Cautious Cal,” whom we saw shot up on the Massachusetts escalator. “Keep cool with Coolidge,” had been the slogan which had got him the greatest vote ever given to a wizard of prosperity. Now the wizard was keeping himself cool upon a high mountain peak in Yellowstone Park. He knew the way to do nothing, and do it more systematically, than any man who had ever held the office. He had as much idea of dipping his fingers into that boiling Boston caldron as he had of spending his vacation in the mountains of the moon. Hundreds of dollars were spent collecting signatures to a petition, and thousands were spent by individuals telegraphing direct. The messages came by the basketful, and served to start the evening fires for a chilly and frugal New Englander.
Musmanno was at Hill’s office, trying for a long-distance telephone connection with Chief Justice Taft. This elder statesman was in Canada, where he could not legally sign a writ; it was Musmanno’s idea that he might come to the border, and there at least hear a petition. The young lawyer had an airplane ready, and would start that Sunday night. He sat at the telephone from seven in the evening until four the next morning, but the great jurist was able to find some perfectly good legal reason for staying where he was.
IX
Deborah was in the apartment, waiting for her mother, to plead with her not to kill herself in this dreadful crisis. Cornelia was hardly able to get up the stairs without help; yet unwilling to go to the Alvin home, where there was an elevator. She could not sleep; she must lie on the bed, with the telephone receiver to her lips, asking for news. She would sink back, and Deborah would think she was resting--but no, she was getting ready to call Mr. Moors, to see if he could not induce Mr. Lowell to induce the Governor to grant a few more days! She was appealing to Hubert Herring, a young Congregational clergyman who had risked his job, getting a dozen other clergymen to sign an appeal to the Governor!
Mother and daughter shouted to each other across an abyss, and just now the abyss was full of thunder, and it was hard for voices to get across. “Mother! Mother!”--Cornelia heard a faint cry--“You think more about two Italian anarchists than you do about any member of your own family!”
“My dear”--Cornelia shouting back--“no one is planning to murder any member of my family.”
Deborah would take a sentence and meditate over it, until an answer became so urgent in her bosom that she would try once more. “Mother, there are other kinds of unhappiness, almost as bad as being murdered.”
“My child, that is God, trying to break the hard shell of your pride.”
Cornelia phoned to Arthur Hill’s office. His daughter-in-law was in charge of the phone, and would tell her if there was any more news. There was none, and Cornelia hung up, and sat staring before her with a face of torment. Deborah’s heart ached, but the only way she could help was to diminish her mother’s interest in those dreadful Italians! “Mother, Henry has become positive that both those men were dynamiters.” And again: “Mother, I believe you really prefer dynamiters to law-abiding people!”
Make allowances for Cornelia. These family disputes, that go on for years and years and never get anywhere, are hard upon the nerves. Said the mother: “I prefer the dynamiter who cares about justice to the most law-abiding person in the world who doesn’t!”
The telephone rang; Deborah’s older daughter, Priscilla, asking if she might come round. This had been one of Deborah’s schemes--her daughter would keep Cornelia’s mind occupied with news about the great-grandchildren. But Priscilla had better not mention that her mother had suggested the visit. Deborah was forever devising such little plots--always, of course, for the other person’s good; and she had trained her older daughter to coöperate.
Cornelia began asking about the wife of Governor Fuller--what sort of woman was she? It seemed that Jessica Henderson and Cornelia were planning to motor up to Rye Beach, New Hampshire, the next day, and implore the help of this much-troubled lady. Deborah told what she had been able to judge from one dinner-party. Mrs. Fuller was a Catholic; and Cornelia asked, what would that mean? Could she possibly be made to understand that Jesus was to be electrocuted in Boston to-morrow midnight?
So Deborah burst out again: “Mother, do you think Jesus ever used dynamite?”
“No, my dear, it wasn’t invented in those days. All he had was a whip, to drive the moneychangers out of Trinity Church.” And after Deborah had expatiated upon the extreme charitableness of Trinity Church, her mother shocked her by exclaiming: “Oh, Boston, Boston, thou that givest the prophets a ride in the patrol-wagon!”
X
Priscilla came, a tall and distinguished young matron now; but she did not get any chance to tell the news about her three children. She found the poor old woman lying back on her pillow with her eyes closed, speaking in whispers which might have come from a death-bed. She took Priscilla’s hand, and said, “I talk to your mother, and it means nothing to her. Let me try the next generation!”
“Yes, Grandmother,” said Priscilla, obediently. “What is it?”
“Your mother cannot understand how anarchists come to be in Boston. So I try to explain to her. When I was a young married woman, about your age, I used to look out of our back windows and see pitiful children of the poor, going about in winter-time with ragged shawls over their shoulders and holes in their shoes, rooting in the frozen garbage in alleys behind the Back Bay homes. I was told that it was the will of God, so I did nothing. But now I have discovered that it is a social system. All those miles of slum tenements down in the South End, falling into ruins, with filth and litter in the alleys and mangy cats prowling--that hideousness which is the underside of our proud and pious city--that is not God, that is blue-blood old ladies and gentlemen holding acres and acres of land, inherited from their great-grandfathers, and letting the tenements fall into ruins while they wait for an increase in land values which they do nothing to produce. Is that so hard to understand, Priscilla?”
“No, Grandmother.”
“Well, that is one detail out of a hundred. Your husband owns millions, because he was allowed to inherit a mountain of copper, which he did nothing to earn, and which others manage and work for him. You will inherit millions because your father is allowed to manufacture the credit of the country and keep it for his own use--no, Deborah, don’t argue with me, for I know you haven’t studied our banking system, even though you are a banker’s wife. Mr. Lowell is a multi-millionaire because he is allowed to exploit the labor of thousands of slaves in cotton-mills--even though he never tended a spindle or managed a factory in his life. Governor Fuller is the richest of all of us, because he is allowed to sit like a robber baron of the Middle Ages, and fine everybody a thousand dollars for the privilege of driving a Packard car in New England. He talks about bandits, and really thinks they should all be executed! All of us sit on top of our privileges, and haven’t the least idea of getting off; we use all the powers of society to seduce or destroy those who resist us--if necessary, we kill them for a crime, whether they committed it or not.”
There were many questions that Priscilla would have liked to ask, and many objections that her mother would have liked to register. But both of them were frightened, thinking that Cornelia might gasp out her life on that bed. So they sat silent, with distress in their eyes; and presently the poor soul was whispering again:
“My children, I have followed this case for seven years, and here is what I know about it, a frightful thing to say--from first to last there has not been one honest man who had anything to do with it on the government side: not a single one, from the policemen who lied on the witness-stand to your three blue-blood commissioners who doctored the record--every man has been seeking a pretext to carry out his will upon two fanatics whom he considers dangerous. That is the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case; and there lie those two men in the death-house, one of them a self-taught philosopher, a man of genius who has managed under the pressure of affliction to make himself into the most beautiful character I have ever known in my years on this earth--”
There came tears from the wrinkled old eyelids. “Sacco, too!” she exclaimed. “A man with the heart of a child!” She put out her hand and took some papers from the lamp-stand by her bed, and began turning them over. “Listen; he is writing to Inez, his six-year-old daughter; a letter which the child may have in after years, to tell her what her father was like:
“‘It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer time to be sitting with you in the home nest under an oak tree shade, beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying, and singing through the little verdant fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another and from the clear vivid stream to your mother’s embrace. The same I have wished and loved to see for other poor girls and their brothers, happy with their mother and father, as I dreamed for us. But it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes has saddened very badly your father’s soul. The men of this dying old society brutally have pulled me away from the embrace of your brother and your poor mother. But in spite of all, the free spirit of your father’s faith survives.’”
XI
On Monday morning, the last day, Governor Fuller came to his office in the State House at half past ten o’clock; rosy and smiling, greeting the newspapermen: “Good morning, boys; a fine day. I’ll be here at my desk until midnight, boys, doing my duty.” Already there were deputations waiting for him, lawyers from New York, editors, writers, labor leaders, society women--he would see them all, in batches, all day long; he would greet them with his marble smile, listen with politeness, and say: “I will take what you have said under consideration.”
Some came to urge him on the other side; including the newly elected officers of the American Legion, which was holding a convention in the State House that morning. Returned soldiers who hadn’t had enough of war, they were keen for this as for all other killings. They were singing the “Star-spangled Banner” at noon, when the first group of pickets began their march on the street outside.
All day long the pickets would come, one batch after another, ten or twenty at a time, with their placards of polite protest, all bad words barred. They would walk their appointed number of paces, and then the police would close about them, and take them in tow, and march them to Joy Street, and then--“Files right!”--to the police-station. The men were packed, eight into a cell, and the women in the guard-room, waiting for their bail.
There were well-known names among them. Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Rockland, Maine, home of her ancestors for many generations. Loveliest of women poets, she would find this a devastating experience; life would not seem the same after a rendezvous with murder. “My personal physical freedom, my power to go in and out when I choose, my personal life even, is no longer quite so important to me as it once was.... The physical world, and that once was all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer make up to me for all the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.”
John Dos Passos again, and John Howard Lawson; also Clarina Michelson, and Paula Holladay--still with her red slicker. And Paxton Hibben--still with his speech. Alfred Baker Lewis of the Socialist Party, Harry Canter for the communists, and Margaret Hatfield, who might be taken as representing the Republicans, since her father was county treasurer. Professor Ellen Hayes of Wellesley College, seventy-six years of age, marching with a cane, and holding her head up high--the most serious hour of a scholar’s life! A picturesque figure she made, in a Norfolk jacket and skirt, square-toed shoes, a little flat hat, and white hair bobbed to her shoulders; bright, eager eyes and sensitive face, now grim--the New England conscience working. “What is your occupation?” asked the clerk. “Professor of astronomy and applied mathematics.” They did not book these very often!
Others to uphold the honor of “Old Boston”: Catharine Huntington, who lived on Pinckney Street, with ancestry going back three hundred years in New England; Helen Peabody, and Helen Todd, suffrage workers; Lola Ridge, the poet--all these New England born, with forefathers on the Mayflower, or the Fortune, the second-best boat. This was true of Edna Millay, of Margaret Hatfield and of Dos Passos. The committee had sent out a call for everybody “with a background”--the polite Boston phrase. Nothing would count so much with the newspapers; the humble Jews and Italians and Slavs--Frishman and Pogrebisky, Chiplovitz and Chasanovitz, Pulcini and Magliocca and Spognodi--these must be content to have their names listed wrong. “What is fame?” say the British army officers. “To die in battle, and have your name misspelled in the Gazette.”
Betty and Joe had their chance now; the police were taking them as they came, blue-bloods and all; so near the end, they no longer worried about public opinion; it would all be over to-night, things would settle down, the dead wops would stay dead. Over in the office of the Boston Herald, on Tremont Street, they were putting into type an editorial, kissing the case good-by. A year ago they had been heroically demanding justice, and winning a prize for it; now what they wanted was “Normalcy.” “Back to Normalcy! The asperities which have attended the Sacco-Vanzetti case in its long and tedious journey through the courts are greatly to be regretted, and should be forgotten as quickly as possible. Let us get back to business and the ordinary concerns of life, in the confident belief that the agencies of law have performed their duties with fairness as well as justice.... The chapter is closed. The die is cast. The arrow has flown. The voice of the department store advertising agent has been heard in the office of the Herald.”--They did not publish that last sentence, of course. That was the truth.
XII
Betty and Joe marshaled all the others, and then joined the last contingent, a group of needle-trade workers, risking their jobs to go to jail. The little party came into Beacon Street, and saw a mob of thousands on the side adjoining the Common. The great iron gates in front of the State House were closed and chained. The policemen were an army, the reporters and photographers and plainclothesmen were another. The pickets were accused of obstructing the sidewalk, but really it was these others who did it.
The little group exposed their signs and began to walk. The cops closed round them, not much formality or delay; the guardians of order were tired, and the seven-minute provision got scant attention. The pickets were told to disperse, and when they walked on, paying no attention, they were shoved against the railing and closed in. “Christ, my arm!” screamed a Jewish boy, not yet out of his teens.
“What are you doing?” cried Betty, to the policeman. “You don’t have to twist his arm like that!”
“Shut up, you bitch!” was the answer.
“I don’t have to! I’ll take your number, and make it hot for you, if you don’t let up on that boy!”
“Shut your trap, and go back where you came from!”
“I came from Commonwealth Avenue, and my father is Rupert Alvin, president of the Pilgrim National Bank of Boston.”
“Holy Jesus!” said the pious cop, and stopped his torture.
The reporters came running; a story for the last afternoon editions. “Have you anything to say, Miss Alvin?”
“Yes, I have a whole speech to make, but your papers won’t print it.”
“Give us a try!”
“Well, I’ll say that the men we are murdering to-night will have a statue in front of the State House before you and I die. I’ll say there are two judges whose names will be linked together in history--Pontius Pilate and Webster Thayer.” Thus Betty, trembling with rage, the white and pink in her lovely cheeks coming and going like Northern lights in the sky.
“Come on, Miss,” said the scared cop; and Betty walked down the street, remarking, “My husband is back there--Joe Randall; he’s got a statement written out.”
So the reporters went to Joe, who gave them a copy of a cablegram he had sent that day, in answer to one from Pierre Leon in Paris: “Tell the workers of the world that the way to punish Boston for this crime is to repudiate the debts. Cancel every dollar owed to America, both publicly and privately. When the first nation does that, Boston will be sorry it committed murder. When the second nation does it, Boston will take steps to bring Sacco and Vanzetti back to life.” Needless to say, that did not appear in any Boston newspaper!
The old Joy Street police station, so oddly named. The main room crowded with tired and disgusted-looking policemen, and young ladies from sheltered homes, getting their first lessons in profanity. “Take these god-dam bastards to number nine.” “Take them bitches to the detention room.” “What the hell we going to do with this new bunch?” There were more than a hundred and fifty in all, and the old place had been built before the program of “loitering for liberty” had been thought of. The walls shook with cheering, and waves of revolutionary song:
_Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earth!_
Outside in the crowd there were Reds who joined in. Boston was honeycombed with sedition, so the patriotic societies declared.
The women sat on the benches lined against the wall. They spread newspapers, for the place was in a state of filth not to be described in print; the walls against which you wanted to lean were covered with dark smears, the blood of that creature which Vanzetti termed the “bed-buck.” If a woman asked for a toilet, she was taken to a place of filth in an open cell among the men. If she asked for a drink, she was pointed to a faucet with a dipper so dirty that she would not take it in her hand. If she complained, the word would be, “Why don’t you go back to Rooshia?” When your time came to be bailed out, you put up two dollars extra for the bailer; graft in Boston had become a system, a vested right. You could even have got a drink of the best liquor, confiscated from the unlicensed bootleggers, if you had looked like the right sort, and had the price. But you could not get the windows of this hellhole opened--not unless everybody would agree to stop singing Bolshevik songs.
XIII
Mary Donovan came, with bail for Powers Hapgood. He was to be her husband before long, and she had reason to be concerned about him now, for he had won special enmity. This was his fourth arrest. After the Sunday demonstration, a fortnight ago, the police had come with a warrant and arrested him again upon the more serious charge of “inciting to riot.” “A bare-headed youth leading women into danger,” said the police sergeant in court, and the judge said, “Six months.”
Powers was nowhere to be found, and there was great alarm. For several hours nobody could find out what had become of him; then came a “tip”--he was in the “Psychopathic.” That had been the bright idea of the captain of the state police. The shortest time in which anybody could get through the “Psychopathic” mill was ten days; and meantime Boston would be “back to normalcy.” It was all for the prisoner’s good, to keep him out of danger, said the police; the most considerate lot of sluggers that ever filled their stomachs with bootleg whisky and their pockets with bootleg graft.
A weird experience for a member of the Dickey and the Hasty Pudding Club and the Harvard Memorial Society! He was a handsome, athletic young fellow, but he looked less impressive after they had stripped him of his clothes, and put him in a dirty bathrobe. They took him to one of the wards, and put him in the very bed in which Sacco had once lain! Next to him was a man who believed himself to be God; on the other side a man who sat with his head in his hands and never moved for hours. The attendants apparently desired to get Powers excited, so that they could put him “on the ice.” They would come and make provocative remarks; a woman nurse started to express her opinion of Sacco--an ugly wop, and she pounded the bed as she said it; worse than that, he was an atheist. Powers was aware of the importance of keeping cool without any ice; he answered amiably, and with his charming smile. One attendant whispered that he was in danger, and offered to phone a doctor for him. Doubtless that was the source of the “tip.”
Doctors came to examine him; all the regulation mental stuff. You believe that Sacco and Vanzetti are being framed? Are you yourself being framed? Have you a mission from God? What are your dreams? Please take this pencil and write, how much is fourteen times fourteen? If twelve is greater than ten put a dot inside the circle which is not inside the square. Did your mother have a hard time at your birth? Explain this little story, how the Pope was crowned and so the little boy died of gilt paint. If you can explain it, then it is established that you are a “nut”!
They must have found this Harvard graduate an interesting specimen, for they put him up before the whole staff that evening. They made him put on his bathrobe backwards; which he thought was to make him look crazy, but doubtless was to keep a lunatic from committing any indecency. There were forty or fifty persons, men and women; doctors, nurses and students, many flappers. They put him on the platform and asked him to explain his ideas about reforming the world; so he made them a little socialist speech, ten minutes at least. They began asking him questions: a flapper wanted to know why he thought Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty. What did he think about the McHardy bomb--the one which had blown out the front of the juror’s home? That was a catch, of course; he would say it was a provocateur job, and then they would all know he was a “nut.”
He said it. He fitted perfectly into their categories. And yet--a singular development--he began to expand before their eyes, and before he stopped, he had smashed their categories. A distressing experience to scientific minds--to have their categories smashed! Some one had said of Herbert Spencer that “his idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact.”
Powers had many facts, all deadly. The strike-breaking agencies planted bombs all the time, nothing simpler. It was the accepted technique of class war in the mining districts; one bomb, and the militia came and broke up the strike. It had been done right here in Massachusetts, by the great Mr. William Wood, president of the American Woolen Company; it had been proved in court, the men he had hired had been sent to jail for it. Too bad that Bostonians didn’t know their own industrial history!
After this session, fifteen alienists turned in a report to the effect that the former member of the Dickey, the Hasty Pudding Club and the Harvard Memorial Society was sane; one of them added that he had better be got out of “Psychopathic” as quickly as possible, or he would make socialists of the whole staff! They held him overnight, in Sacco’s bed, and in the morning they turned him loose--the first man who had ever got through the mill in one day. A triumph for a Harvard education!
XIV
Monday noon, with the execution twelve hours away, the Governor was in session with three lawyers of national repute: Arthur Garfield Hays, Frank P. Walsh, and Francis Fisher Kane, formerly a Federal prosecutor in Pennsylvania. These three were concentrating upon the subject of the Department of Justice files. They had traveled all the way to Vermont, to interview the United States Attorney-General. They had then proceeded to Washington, to interview a subordinate, and had succeeded in getting the admission that Sacco and Vanzetti were referred to in the files; also the written statement that the files would be turned over to the Massachusetts authorities, if these authorities would request it. Now the three lawyers endeavored, in vain, to persuade the Governor to make the request.
At this same hour, Arthur D. Hill was off the coast of Maine in a steamer, searching in a fog for an island eight miles out, where lived Justice Stone of the United States Supreme Court; Elias Field, assistant counsel, was making a motion before another judge of the Superior Court of Massachusetts; Musmanno was waiting for a chance to appeal to the Governor with new arguments and affidavits of new witnesses; while Jessica Henderson and Cornelia were motoring eighty miles or more to the Governor’s summer home to make their appeal to the great man’s wife.
A stately home for a multi-millionaire, set far back from the boulevard, and well hidden by shrubbery. When the owner himself was there, a miniature army was on guard; twenty-six men, with several machine-guns, and seventy-five reserves in a near-by town. But apparently it was not feared that the enemy would harm the family, for now there was only one plainclothesman on watch.
The Governor’s wife received the visitors courteously, and heard them to the end. Evidently the other members of the family resented the strain being put upon her, for three different persons came, seeking to cut the session short; but Mrs. Fuller would not have it so.
Cornelia knew something about the cares of office. She had realized that possibly the jauntiness of the supersalesman was merely a mask; it was his idea of being “game,” the male courage which defies death and danger. Certainly it was not the same in his family; his wife had been ill, his son and daughter had been ill. “It has taken years from his life!” exclaimed the woman. “You can have no idea what it means. We, too, sit in the electric-chair.” Cornelia, who had lived for forty years in a home of wealth, knew the whole story--even though in Josiah’s day they had not thought about anarchists and dynamite. Somehow or other, great sums of money found a way to wreck the happiness of those who held them. Yet, no one would give them up, no one would cease the mad chase!
Cornelia poured out her story. It was one to move any woman’s heart, and the Governor’s lady sat with tears welling into her eyes. A little boy, her youngest child, played about the room and sat on the arm of Cornelia’s chair; she told him about Plymouth, and about Trando, who had made himself a violinist; about Dante Sacco, who had bidden his father farewell in the death-cell, but had not been allowed to touch him through the bars. She told the mother about the framing of witnesses, and some of the new evidence they had found. But even while she spoke, she read in the face of her listener that her errand was a vain one.
“I can do nothing but this, Mrs. Thornwell; I will have the Governor see you to-day, so that you may tell him these things.”
“I have already told him so much,” answered Cornelia. “I was hoping you would go with me to the Governor.”
“No, I could not do that; it would do no good, I assure you.”
Mrs. Fuller would telephone, and see to it that Mrs. Thornwell and Mrs. Henderson had another interview that afternoon. The Governor must be made to comprehend those circumstances which made it so doubtful whether the men were really guilty. The Governor’s lady put her arm about Cornelia as she led her out to the car; and Cornelia thought, if only the women would run the world! But no, she had seen it happen; women went into public life, and became as hard as the men. Could it be that, as Vanzetti said, there was something fundamentally immoral about the business of dominating the lives of your fellows?
XV
Three hours later they were back at the State House, having made no stop for lunch. There were larger crowds than ever in the corridors before the Governor’s chambers, more than half of them secret service men and reporters. Mrs. Fuller had kept her promise; the Governor would see the two ladies, the secretary said.
Tom O’Connor sat with them while they waited; a reporter who was now with the defense, having given up a State House job a year ago. He would tell them the news.
Delegations to see the Governor, all through that day; there had been more than nine hundred telegrams received; few of them read. Musmanno had brought more affidavits; he had had word that his application for a writ had been docketed with the United States Supreme Court. Fuller had not said what he would do. A deputation of labor men from New York had been in a while ago; Fuller had said to one of them, “I know the men are guilty, so I don’t care whether they had a fair trial or not.” “He said those same words to me,” said Cornelia; and then, “old Boston” speaking in her, “Don’t quote me, please.”
Never had there been so many sensations, piling one upon another--not in the memory of the oldest employee at the State House. The Springfield Republican had published a powerful editorial, underscoring the doubts as to the men’s guilt; Seward Collins, publisher of the Bookman, had put up the money to insert it as a full-page advertisement in every Boston newspaper. The Globe had refused the money; others had run the ad that morning, and the State House gang was furious. Then, bright and early, who should walk in but Waldo Cook, editor of the Republican--sixty-two years of age, and the most respected journalist in New England. He came with a deputation of editors to see the Governor, and the private secretary tackled him. “I understand, Mr. Cook, that you got twenty thousand dollars from the defense committee for that editorial.” “It’s a damned lie!” said the editor.
“I suppose they get used to taking money here in the State House,” said Cornelia; and O’Connor grinned. The Governor himself was no better than his secretary, when it came to repeating charges without evidence. He had said to one deputation that Professor Frankfurter had been paid great sums by the defense; he would go on saying this, even though he had been many times assured that it was false. He was obsessed with hatred of Frankfurter, and blamed him more than any other; he would accuse people of having read Frankfurter’s book, and if they admitted this crime, he would not hear them any longer.
XVI
The two ladies were ushered into the presence: two persistent pests who had sneaked into a man’s home, seeking to undermine his domestic peace! Nevertheless, he would be polite. He had set himself the task of remaining here until midnight, and seeing every one who came; and one person was about the same as the next.
He started at once on the aggressive. “My wife tells me that you ladies still don’t think the men had a fair trial. But you must know they had three trials--one before Judge Thayer, one before the Lowell Commission, and one which I have conducted in these rooms. I tell you that I would not ask for my own son any fairer trial than that which took place before Mr. Lowell.”
Said Cornelia: “It is the first principle of our law that the accused shall be confronted by the witnesses against them. But Sacco and Vanzetti did not see many of the witnesses who appeared before Mr. Lowell.”
“Surely you must realize the absurdity of such a proposition! How could those desperate anarchists have been brought every day to the State House?”
“All right, if it is too much trouble to conform to the principles of our law, let us follow our convenience--but then don’t claim that it is a fair trial.”
“The men were represented by the best counsel.”
“Even the counsel were barred sometimes; they were not present at Judge Thayer’s examination; they were limited in questioning Katzmann. Worse than that--they don’t even know the names of all the witnesses. I understand that Mr. Lowell is saying that he had ‘confidential information.’ He is telling that to all his friends; and what place have secret whispers in a fair trial? You say that the trial before Judge Thayer was fair--yet the Lowell report admits that Judge Thayer committed ‘a grave breach of official decorum.’”
“That was after the trial, Mrs. Thornwell.”
“It was while he still had the various motions before him. He was still the judge of the case, and the sole judge, right up to the time he pronounced sentence last April, and automatically excluded any other judge from acting. Are not men entitled to have new evidence considered before an unprejudiced judge? And who else has considered that evidence?”
“I have, Mrs. Thornwell; and I think that I have common sense, even if I haven’t legal training.”
“Pardon me, Governor, but we have suffered much from inability to get you to consider new evidence. We brought you the express receipt for eels, but we are told that you say you know Vanzetti never got them. We bring you the Pinkerton reports, but we don’t know if you know what is in them. They cancel Mary Splaine, but you still go on citing Mary Splaine. We bring you the son of Lola Andrews, and he tells you that his mother is not to be trusted, but you go on trusting her. You tell Musmanno that you don’t believe Vanzetti ever sold fish, and Musmanno brings you an affidavit from Carbone, the wholesaler from whom Vanzetti bought fish in Plymouth regularly. We bring you all sorts of affidavits, but nothing does the least good, because you have some secret information that we are not permitted to know about, and that determines the whole matter for you. What is it, Governor--tell us now, instead of too late. Believe me, the world is going to know some day!”
Thus the little old white-haired woman; and with elaborate and patient courtesy the sorely tried statesman assured her that she had fallen victim to the machinations of dangerous and depraved persons. He had the duty of deciding this case, not she; and when he made promises to witnesses in fear of their lives, he would keep those promises. When she broke down and wept, and Mrs. Henderson began to plead for mercy, he said that Massachusetts was in the grip of a crime wave, and that to pardon guilty men would set a dangerous precedent. He had refused to pardon the “car-barn bandits,” even though they were native Americans, one of them a World War veteran. No, he was not troubled by the clamor from outside, the pleadings of what people said were “great minds”; they might be great in their own line, but they didn’t know about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. This clamor would pass quickly. When Cornelia started to argue against capital punishment, his answer was: “You and I both sleep better in a state which has capital punishment.”
Cornelia gazed at him, with a look of dismay. She could not reply to such words. Men had killed their fellows for fear and for hate, for piety and for glory, for exercise, for sport, for food; but here for the first time in recorded history they killed for a soporific! The little old woman stood up, trembling.
“Governor Fuller, answer me this: What are you going to do when we find the real criminals? Somewhere in the world are two men who really did the Bridgewater job; somewhere are four, or five, who did the South Braintree job. And rest assured, we are going to find them--we are never going to rest until we have found them--and then, how will you be able to face life? What will all you gentlemen do--judges and governors and college presidents--knowing that you sent two innocent men to their death? What will there be in the world for you--but insanity or suicide?”
He did not answer, and she went out, with despair plainly written upon her aged face, for all the newspapermen to see and record. In the corridor they told her the news, right hot off the wire--Arthur Hill had telephoned to his office, Justice Stone had turned down his request. The lawyer was up in Maine, and could not get back to Boston until morning, so his work was at an end.
What had Mrs. Thornwell to say to that? What was she going to do? The reporters gathered about, eager for more story. A marvelous melodrama this was to them--a whole day packed full of thrills! Melodrama at the State House, with millionaires and blue-bloods and “headliners” of all sorts in a fourteen-hour stream! All over the city, with two hundred persons arrested, and tens of thousands looking on; with poets and hoboes, “Reds” and “scions of wealth,” famous lawyers and judges, playing their lively parts! All over the world, with bombs exploding and plate glass shattering, mobs yelling and cavalry charging! And at the end death waiting, in the aspect of a chair with widespread, capacious arms, gaping for its victims! Monday, August 22nd, 1927, a date never to be forgotten in the history of the world!
XXIII. THE LAST ENEMY
I
In a room in the Hotel Bellevue, adjoining the State House, five lawyers from New York, all volunteers in the case, had worked all Sunday night and part of Monday, eighteen consecutive hours, concocting legal formulas and having them typed. On the roof of the hotel were detectives, and in the windows of the State House opposite; for the spectacle of lights burning all night in a room known to be occupied by Reds exercised an irresistible spell upon the authorities. “What are they doing now? Where are they going?” Half a dozen automobiles waited outside the hotel, and whenever one of the lawyers took a taxi, the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts trailed behind.
Now the Boston lawyers had failed, and admitted their failure; the New York lawyers had the field, with seven or eight hours to go. They asked for a hearing before Federal Judge Lowell, and he set the hour of six o’clock. A court session consisting of one judge, five lawyers, and a score of newspapermen. The judge resented the intrusion of “foreigners” into this case, and took occasion to say what all ruling-class Boston was thinking. He accused the strangers of “trying the case in the newspapers”; he interrupted them again and again to demand “law, not eloquence.” When William Schuyler Jackson, ex-Attorney General of New York State, was showing the conspiracy carried on by Katzmann to deceive the jury at the Dedham trial, the judge broke in: “Did you ever see a Norfolk county farmer?” The lawyer, disconcerted, had to admit, “Not in reality.” Whereupon the judge snapped out: “Well, if you had, you’d have a better opinion of that jury.”
It made magnificent copy for the newspapers; the Herald put it in a “box”--“Judge Lowell Praises Norfolk County Farmers”--and all patriots swelled with pride. Wonderful beings were Norfolk county farmers, and wonderful also the Lowells, who spoke only to Cabots, who spoke to God. It was the hard luck of the ex-Attorney General of New York State that he was not familiar with the details of the case; otherwise he might have made answer to the arrogant judge: “The Sacco-Vanzetti jury consisted of two real estate men, two machinists, a grocer, a mason, a stockkeeper, a clothing salesman, a mill operative, a shoemaker, a lastmaker, and one Norfolk county farmer!”
The lawyers loaded themselves into an automobile, together with Isaac Don Levine, journalist, and set out for Beverly, to make a last appeal to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Detectives trailed behind them, and more detectives met them at their destination. The very old gentleman sat in his parlor, talking with two very old ladies; a chaste New England home, everything antique, in the taste of a bygone age. The lawyers presented their petition, and the judge sat himself down to peruse it--four thousand words of “law, not eloquence.” A dead silence; and Levine sat in the hall, listening to the ticking of a “grandfather’s clock.” “Life-death, life-death, life-death,” it said; the listener shivered.
The old gentleman looked up. “I appreciate the general force of your argument,” he said--and their hearts leaped. He was famous for the so-called “judicial mind,” his ability to consider legal principles in a vacuum completely freed of human emotion. He went on: “I am of the opinion that the petition is covered by the principles stated in my decisions upon the former applications for habeas corpus and certiorari, and therefore I am compelled to deny the writ.”
The lawyers excused themselves, and got into the car again, and whirled back to Boston. One more hope; Federal Judge Anderson, who was not quite so free from human emotion. Seven years back, he had condemned the Red raids in an exhaustive and scorching decision. Now he was attending the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, two hundred miles away, and Tom O’Connor had arranged at the East Boston naval airport to charter an airplane to take John Finerty, a leading lawyer of Washington, formerly assistant counsel for the U. S. Railroad Commission. It would be a risky journey at night, but they had worked for eighteen hours over those four thousand words of “law, not eloquence,” and wanted to make it count if they could.
The nearest landing field was in Albany, New York, fifty miles from Williamstown. O’Connor had arranged with a taxi company to have a cab waiting at the landing field. All was ready; but alas, some one tipped off the authorities at the airport as to who these nefarious persons were, and a naval officer ordered them off the premises. “It would give me pleasure to shoot you,” he said to the ex-Attorney General of New York State; and next day the newspapers reported that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been asked to put a special guard over the airport, threatened with seizure by the Reds!
II
From a window of the Hod Carriers’ Union in Salem Street, Ella Reeve Bloor was explaining the case as an episode in the class struggle to a crowd of some hundreds of solemn-faced workers. “Mother” Bloor, they called her; sixty-five years old, she had raised a brood of five children, and turned them loose in the radical movement, and so was free to wander over America, wherever workingmen on strike called for a martyr. A little round jolly figure, full of laughter, brown as a hickory nut and as solid, she said her say, until the policemen forced their way into the union headquarters and dragged her out. “Inciting to riot,” was the charge.
At the same time Paula Holladay was getting arrested in her red “slicker” again; they took it away from her this time! Over near Charlestown prison another group were preparing to walk into the den of blue-coated lions; their leader was Helen Peabody, one of those “with a background,” who conceived it her duty to be in jail when the execution took place. In an obscure hall near defense headquarters, Betty and Joe were speaking to a somber crowd. It would not save Sacco and Vanzetti, but it would save their message, as Joe pointed out. Let the workers learn, and organize to defend themselves against ruling class murder.
A curious instance, then going on, to illustrate Joe’s message. Everywhere in Boston the workers had been dragged to jail for attempting to voice their protest; but in the town of Peabody, some twenty miles away from Boston, there was now going on a meeting in the public square, at which ten thousand workers were voicing their feelings unmolested. How came that? Quite simple; the workers of Peabody had taken the precaution to elect themselves a Socialist mayor. Yesterday, Sunday, the chief of police had broken up a mass meeting, in the regulation Mike Crowley style; the mayor had been on vacation, and hearing the news, had hastened back, and removed the chief of police from office, and taken charge of to-night’s meeting himself, and introduced Alfred Baker Lewis as the principal speaker. Would the workers of Boston learn anything from that?
Governor Fuller was in session with Congressman La Guardia, who had flown all the way from Washington in an airplane; an Italian, he pleaded for mercy for two men of his race. Musmanno, having presented four new affidavits in vain, waited outside for a chance to present one more. He argued with Attorney General Reading, counsel for the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.,” seeking to persuade him that it would be a discourtesy to the United States Supreme Court, to take the life of two men, when their appeal was actually on file before that high tribunal. Mr. Reading did not answer Musmanno’s argument; neither did he say what he would advise the Governor. Death was only three or four hours away.
Over in the death cells, Sacco was bidding a last farewell to his wife, and Vanzetti to his sister. The men stretched their arms through the bars; the women broke down, and had to be carried out, sobbing wildly. They belonged to a demonstrative race--one of the reasons why stern New England did not like them. Nevertheless, New England would read about it--column after column in the next morning’s papers--“sob stuff,” that sold best of anything.
Rosina and Luigia decided to try one last appeal to the Governor. They had not intended to do it; they knew in their hearts that they would fail; but they had several hours to pass, and it was easier to do anything than to do nothing. Friends telephoned and made the appointment, and at nine o’clock they arrived at the State House, a fortress surrounded by armed men, the searchlights which usually illuminated the golden dome now turned upon the crowds in the streets. They ascended in the elevator, and Rosina walked ahead, through the rows of silent newspapermen; Luigia followed hesitatingly, bewildered by this strange environment. Musmanno was there to act as interpreter, and they were shown into the private office, where so many had sat and poured out eloquence in vain.
Rosina Sacco spoke first, in English. She told of her faith in her husband’s innocence. She told about the trial; about Lola Andrews, the hysteric; about Captain Proctor, who had admitted his trick; about Goodridge, the many-times convicted crook; about Mary Splaine, and what the Pinkerton reports had revealed about her. She told about Judge Thayer; over and over, she insisted that the trial had not been fair. She asked for mercy. The Governor was a father, and he was sentencing two children to lose their father, and to wear a dreadful brand all their lives.
The great man listened with politeness--his store of the commodity was inexhaustible. He turned to the frail worn sister of Vanzetti, who began speaking in soft musical Italian, the young lawyer translating sentence by sentence. She had just come from her brother in the gloomy deathhouse; his protestations of innocence were ringing in her ears. He had asked her to convey a message to the Governor. Some weeks ago Bartolomeo had shaken hands with the Governor in the prison, and he thought that he had demonstrated his innocence; the Governor had given him that impression; now he could not understand how the Governor would let the death sentence stand. If he could have one more chance to talk with the Governor and answer his objections, he, Bartolomeo, was sure the death sentence would not be carried out.
For more than an hour the salesman of motor-cars listened, without interrupting. At last the two women said that they were through; and then, leaning forward slightly in his chair, he gave his answer. He appreciated the feelings of both of them, and was sorry for them. But he had taken an oath to uphold the constitution and laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and his conscience dictated that he should permit the law to take its course.
But still, he would be polite. Excessively so; as if he were paying compliments at a social function; or as if he were selling a Packard limousine. To some final argument of Musmanno’s he replied: “What you have said impresses me greatly. But even that is nothing compared with the eloquence of these ladies’ presence.” Was this one of the dreadful perversions of Puritanism? A kind of sadistic pleasure in inflicting torture with a smile? Whatever it was, it failed to make a hit with Rosina Sacco. “Let us go,” she said, coldly, and they rose, and walked slowly from the room.
The newspapermen besought Musmanno to tell them what had happened, and he tried to do it; he touched upon a few of the arguments which the women had presented, but before he had got very far the tears began to run down his cheeks, and he had to stop. He went over to a chair and sat down and buried his face in his hands and sobbed. It was then half past ten, and the grandfather’s clocks which kept the time for all Massachusetts were ticking steadily, with fifty-four hundred seconds still to go.
III
At six o’clock Cornelia had gone back to her home. The chauffeur had to help her up the stairs; and there were Deborah and Clara with the Negro maid, ready to come running, and lead her to the bed, and make any amount of fuss; to bring her tea or coffee, or a glass of milk, or a poached egg on toast. No, she could not eat; they pleaded, and wanted to phone for Dr. Morrow. The tears ran down their cheeks; they would do anything, abase themselves, agree with her wildest words, in the effort to quiet her, and persuade her that their love meant something. They were terrified at her appearance and her attitude; ashamed because they had shown so little sympathy in the past. Yes, no doubt there were very fine and good qualities in anarchists--anything, anything--so that their mother would stop killing herself!
Clara’s precious youngest had got poison ivy all over him, and was shut up in the house with a poultice over his eyes; her oldest, who was just out of Harvard, was suspected to be on the verge of getting engaged at Bar Harbor; the oldest little fat treasure of Priscilla had got a bee sting over one eyelid, otherwise his mother would have been here. Quincy Thornwell had won a chess match--such items of family gossip Clara poured out, in a premeditated torrent--only to discover that her mother was not hearing a word. “Please, Clara, I can’t think about anything now. Let me be quiet.”
Deborah had taken the precaution to get a prescription from Dr. Morrow; it was his advice that Cornelia should take a strong sleeping powder and forget the ugly world and everything in it for at least twelve hours. But Cornelia said no. When her oldest daughter tried to insist, she said, “I was talking with one of the lawyers from New York, and he offered me a quart of whisky. If all hopes fail, he will retire to his hotel room and get drunk.” The silence of Deborah and Clara said plainly, it was what everybody in Boston had known about that New York crowd! Cornelia, reading their thoughts, remarked grimly: “The whisky might give him pleasure, so that is immoral. But a sleeping powder is strictly business!”
The women decided to call in Henry, who understood the insides of this crisis so much better than they. So Henry put off dinner with an important banker from New York, and came over to sit by the bedside and tell his mother-in-law how it was possible for Boston to do this dreadful deed; how it was possible for such wickedness to be organized, and in control of society. “With all that new evidence before them, Henry! And with an appeal to the United States Supreme Court actually docketed!”
“Docketed doesn’t mean anything, Mother. It simply means that you have put your request on file; it doesn’t mean that it will get anywhere. In this case I assure you it wouldn’t.”
“Henry, if we could manage to keep those boys alive until October, we could really get the public to understand about this case, and they would never dare to execute them.”
“Well, I guess that’s just it, Mother. Fuller can’t afford to let the case go on growing and growing.”
She pondered that. “I have just heard that Quincy has won a chess match; and now the Governor is winning one, with human lives for pawns!”
IV
She told about her last interview, and the things that had been said. She told about the trip to Rye Beach; it was quite a story, and helped to pass the time without whisky or drugs. Deborah and Clara refrained from breaking in; there must be no arguments, nothing to excite the patient; each minute that passed was a danger escaped. Deborah ventured to make some remarks on the subject of Mrs. Fuller, and the problem of Catholic wives and Protestant husbands. The Governor was such an ardent Baptist, he wanted to teach a Sunday school. Was he letting his children be brought up as Catholics?
But no use; Cornelia could not be diverted from the main topic. “Henry, did you find out what is that ‘confidential information’ that Mr. Lowell and the Governor are talking about?”
“There’s a lot of it, Mother; they keep quoting the Italian colony and what it thinks about the case.”
“The ‘Italian colony’! Do you stop to realize what the words mean? There are as many differences inside the Italian colony as in any other part of New England. The ruling group is Fascist; they hate Sacco and Vanzetti exactly as Judge Thayer does--only more so, because they know them better. The majority of the colony is Catholic; and when Bart was arrested he had on him a letter in which one of their priests was described as a ‘pig.’ Of course all the Italians know who that priest is. Does the Governor take the opinion of the priest? Or of his parishioners?”
“The story runs something like this, Mother: one of the Italian anarchists got drunk and talked, and admitted that Sacco had been in the bandit car at South Braintree.”
“I’ve heard that,” said Cornelia. “I’ve heard many such stories. But of course I couldn’t guess which one the Governor of our Commonwealth and the President of our University would elect to believe. What do they say about Bart?”
“They don’t think Bart was in the car, but they think he knew about it, which made him an accessory before the fact.”
“Before, or after, Henry--are they sure which?” A pause. “And so that is what Mr. Lowell meant when he said that he thought Vanzetti was guilty ‘on the whole’! I am solving the riddles which have tormented me for weeks! Who do they say was actually in the car?”
“Boda and Coacci and Orciani.”
“Mike Stewart’s theory complete! Have they overlooked the fact that Orciani punched a time clock that day in the foundry where he worked?”
“The story is that he got somebody else to do it for him.”
Cornelia sat, gazing with her inner eye into the face of Massachusetts statesmanship. “So that is why our boys have to die! Somebody got drunk and talked, and the talk came to the ears of our great men! Stop and think what this means, Henry--the breakdown of our legal system and our moral codes! Was it one of the guilty men who got drunk and talked?”
“No, that is not what I understand.”
“It couldn’t very well have been Sacco or Vanzetti, since they have been in jail, and couldn’t get liquor in our model prisons, and anyhow, they don’t drink. It couldn’t have been Coacci, who was deported before the arrests took place; nor Orciani, nor little Mike Boda, who are sitting out on a barren rock somewhere in the Mediterranean, as prisoners of the Fascist government.”
“Fuller doesn’t claim it was the guilty ones who talked; it was one of their comrades.”
“That is what I am trying to get straight. One of the bandits told a comrade, and this comrade got drunk and talked! Did he talk to Governor Fuller?”
“That is not the way I heard it.”
“Hardly! There are automobile salesmen who get people drunk, I suppose, but not ardent Baptists, with Sunday school inclinations. We have to assume that some government spy got the anarchist comrade drunk, and then the anarchist comrade talked, and the spy told the Governor about it. Or maybe even that is too undignified for a Governor--surely it would have been for Mr. Lowell! Deborah, do you think Mr. Lowell would stoop to listen to a spy?”
Deborah understood that this was a rhetorical question, and prudently made no reply; Cornelia went on, working herself into a cold fury.
“Our dignity requires us to assume that the spy talked to some police official, whose business it is to know spies. So then we have this: Sacco or Vanzetti or Coacci or Orciani or Boda told an anarchist comrade that they were guilty; this comrade got drunk and told a police spy; this spy told the police; the police told the Governor; and the Governor told Mr. Lowell and Mr. Stratton and Judge Grant! So they have ‘confidential information,’ and decide that ‘on the whole’ they think Vanzetti was guilty! That is how our laws are enforced, that is our police system and our legal system and our judicial system and our political system and our educational system! Such are the masters of our youth and the guides of our intellectual life!”
“Mother--” began Deborah; but Cornelia exercised the privilege of age, to do the talking when she wanted to.
“There is a saying--all three of our educated commissioners know it, and possibly told it to our Governor--‘in vino veritas.’ But proverbs are false more often than they are true. Think how many circumstances there might be under which you would get falsehood from drunkenness, instead of truth. Suppose there was some personal grudge; or some vainglorious fool, taking pride in knowing a secret that was baffling the whole world! Suppose it was some one who had heard a rumor, and turned it into knowledge; suppose the talker were a Fascist agent, a spy himself--such things have happened. Anything in the world can happen, where men make their living by betrayal, and their rewards depend upon the tales they bring in. I know enough about the anarchist movement to say that you will find every sort of disordered mind in it; also, you will find every kind of rascal among the men who are trying to destroy it. From such a situation there arises a poisonous mist, a gas cloud of gossip and scandal. I thought that the whole purpose of our judicial system was to deliver men from such terrors; to force accusers to come out into the daylight, in open court! But here our great Commonwealth has proved itself worse than one of the Sewing Circles!”
V
Cornelia sat up, with an announcement which terrified her family. “I am going to see those boys before they die!”
“Mother! Mother!” All three of them started to protest at once. Impossible! Not to be thought of!
“I went Saturday, and the warden wouldn’t let me see them. I wrote them letters; but that is not enough, I refuse to accept it. I am not going to let them go out of this world without bidding them good-by.”
“Mother, the strain would kill you!”
“It is less than the strain of lying here doing nothing. I am only two or three miles from them--”
“A difficult two or three miles, Mother.” It was Henry speaking. “The bridge is closed, and the streets roped off--”
“Governor Fuller can write a dozen words, and the road will be clear. He is going to do it for me! I am going to have a talk with Bart--and ask him to tell me the truth! I know that I can help him, and Nick, too. I am going to see the Governor--phone for me, Henry, and make sure he is still at his office.”
Cornelia got up, in spite of all protests, and began to arrange her hair and put on her hat. Henry phoned, and got the information; then, when he saw that all argument was futile--that she was going to call a taxicab and go alone if necessary--he said: “Stay here, Mother, and rest. I will go and get the pass for you--if Fuller will give it.”
“He must give it! I will not take a refusal! It will cost him nothing, it will do nobody any harm. Deborah, you go with Henry; you gave that creature a dinner party, now make him pay for it!”
All right, Deborah would go; anything to keep the poor soul quiet for another half hour. “It is a mad idea, Mother, but I will do the best I can.”
“I know that you can do it! Promise me that you will do it, Henry--I will never forgive you if you play me a trick.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Mother--”
“You might think it was for my good. But I know myself better than you. I have a right to say good-by to those friends who have taught me so much. Tell the Governor that maybe they will confess to me--he’ll be fool enough to believe that, I am sure! Tell him that you are very important persons, that he will shine by your reflected light! Telephone me the moment you get the answer--because I am coming myself if you fail!”
The State House lies just over the top of Beacon Hill, and it took Henry’s car only five minutes to get there. Being large and expensive, it went past the guards without delay, and very soon there was a ring of the telephone by Cornelia’s bed; she took the receiver with trembling hands, and heard the voice of her son-in-law: “All right, Mother. The Governor has been so kind as to give his consent.” She could tell by the phrasing and the tone of his voice that he was speaking from the great man’s office.
She got up and got herself ready, with Clara’s help, and in a few minutes Henry’s chauffeur was at the door, ready to assist her down the stairs. Clara went along--they would all go, expecting her to collapse, fearing she might die of the strain. Since opposition only made things harder, they must turn themselves into slaves of her whim; at the same time agreeing in their hearts with the Governor, they would be glad when this was over!
VI
There sat a strange man in the seat by the chauffeur; a police official in civilian clothing, who had been at the State House, and whom the Governor had assigned as an escort. They came quickly to Prison Point Bridge, across the Miller River to Charlestown, where the old prison stands. At the bridge entrance the lights of the car fell upon officers waving the traffic to a detour; behind them a solid line of blue-coats, with riot-guns in hand; behind these latter a group of mounted men, and behind them iron gates. A couple of motorcycle officers shot out towards them, blowing a shrill warning to bring them to a halt.
So began the tedious process of breaking down the barriers which the stern Commonwealth had set up against anarchists and bomb-throwers that night. The police official produced the paper with the golden crest at the top and the magic signature at the bottom. “To police officers of Boston and Charlestown: You will permit Mr. Henry Cabot Winters and party to drive to Charlestown prison this Monday evening. Warden Hendry will permit Mrs. Thornwell to converse with Sacco and Vanzetti for one hour, subject to his convenience, and without interference with his plans. Alvan T. Fuller, Governor.” It was a signature familiar to all Bostonians, being regularly attached to advertisements, telling the eagerly expectant motor-world the latest wonders which “Packard” had to impart. “This will prove to be the most popular model which Packard has ever offered to sons and daughters who may have their own cars.... When may we show you this latest offering?” It did not seem to the Commonwealth at all humiliating to have a Governor who wheedled; neither did it trouble the sons and daughters of the rich who were able to have their own luxury cars that the same signature was attached to advertisements and to death warrants.
The fact that the police official was not in uniform may have accounted for the delay. One of the motorcycle men took the order back to the group, to show to his superior; after which he rode out to the car again and ordered it forward. The blue-clad lines gave way, the gates swung open, and the car rolled through. But half way across the bridge, there was another pair of gates, with another line of guardians, and the same procedure to be repeated. It was like the German entrenchments--the Hindenburg line, the Siegfried line, the Wotan line. In the river, below the bridge, were speed-boats of the harbor-patrol, their searchlights sweeping the docks and the tracks of the Boston and Maine Railroad. Along the tracks were searchlights, three in a group, weaving futurist patterns on the night.
A third line, strongest of all, at the Charlestown end of the bridge. The military formalities were complied with, and the car started up Austin Street, when the revolving searchlight on the prison tower picked it out, and seemed to be a signal to a score of mounted troopers to come galloping from every direction. Other searchlights, mounted on the prison wall and sweeping up and down the streets, brought out their figures, shining white for moments, then lost in semi-darkness.
“Why don’t you send a man to pass us through?” demanded the police official, with some irritation; but apparently they hadn’t intended to pass any one through. They had a deadline, three hundred yards from the prison walls, blocking every street, and running over the tops of houses, where men sat with machine-guns, and stores of tear-bombs. The inhabitants of houses within the barred area were confined indoors, not even permitted on the steps; they could lean out of windows, and the searchlights shone upon rows of faces, staring white.
The instructions had been for the car to go to the warden’s home, which constituted a separate entrance to the prison enclosure. “No publicity, if you please, Mr. Winters,” the Governor had said; and this was to the taste of a blue-blood family. The warden would be notified by telephone to expect them, and would smuggle them in, with no reporters crowding about, and no picturesque stories in the morning: “Widow of Ex-Governor Visits Condemned Men in Last Hours!” The car had to make a part circle of the aged fortress, and it gave even high-up Brahmins a realization of their importance, the favor which was being granted to them. Eight times they were halted and investigated; every foot of the way the searchlights followed them suspiciously, revealing bright bayonets and heavy riot guns, firemen with high pressure hoses ready for action, rows of horsemen drawn up against the prison walls, and motorcycles darting suddenly forth. Once a bomb went off--but not a dangerous one; only newspaper photographers taking photographs of the line of cavalry defending the main gate of the prison. Earth, water, even air were being guarded; searchlights played in the sky--a spiritualist medium having called at the prison, announcing that she had had a vision of an airplane dropping bombs. The Sacco-Vanzetti case had started from crystal-gazing, so it was reasonable that it should end with clairvoyance.
VII
They came to the warden’s home and drew up at the curb. More parleys, after which the police official assisted Cornelia out of the car. The chauffeur was told to stay in his seat--no unnecessary chances taken. Deborah and Clara and Henry would sit where they were. The armed men stepped back, and the door opened, and prison guards met the visitors, and silently led them through the house and into the yard, past the cell-blocks, oblong brick buildings with rows of narrow barred windows. The lights were out, and the prison was supposed to be asleep, but the searchlights made the scene as bright as day, and nobody slept. There were white faces at the windows, and now and then a chorus of cries: “Let them out! Let them out!” Wild beasts, barking, howling, roaring in their cages!
To Cornelia it was as if she had taken Dante’s place, in a journey through the various stages of hell: all this elaborate display of killing power, a thousand intricate and ingenious inventions, all the arts and sciences which civilization had contrived, applied to the wholesale and instantaneous wiping out of human life. The fact that this military force was for Cornelia’s protection, that it gave back respectfully before the magic of her name, only filled her with the greater abhorrence, only proved her thesis, that its purpose was not justice, but the comfort and safety of the rich.
The death-house: a square brick building, immediately under the prison wall, a highly unstrategic position, which in part accounted for the need of a miniature army. Upon the wall with its wooden walk stood a line of machine gunners, and men were lined up several deep upon the sidewalk of Rutherford Avenue below the wall. Across the street were firemen with four high-pressure hoses.
There was a group of guards at the door of the death-house, and the warden came out, and took over the task of escorting the privileged old lady. A dreadful ordeal: Cornelia had to pass through the execution-chamber, and the canvas cover was off the chair; the heavy leather straps at the hands and feet dangled and called for their victims. One glance, and then the warden half lifted Cornelia and walked her swiftly on. He had had to do that same thing for many women, relatives of the condemned. It was not a jolly job this plump and round-faced old Scotchman had found himself.
The death cells, three in a row, opening upon a corridor; each cell a narrow little room with steel-barred door; in each a cot, a table, a little bureau. A neat, white-tiled floor, and on the outside, running the length of the corridor, a painted line, six feet from the cells, beyond which no visitor might step. Cornelia knew the lay-out, the lawyers having described it to her. In the first cell was Madeiros, in the second Sacco, in the third, the farthest from the death-chamber, Vanzetti. It was the order in which they were to “go.”
Cornelia tottered to the last cell. A light inside; the occupant was sitting on his cot, with the table drawn up before him, writing one of his farewell letters. He heard a faint cry, “Bart!” and started and shoved the table away. “Nonna!” A second more and he was at the door, his arm through the bars; Cornelia ran to him--it was automatic, no way to help it--and anyhow, the warden was holding her, and not trying to hold her back. She clasped the outstretched hand and wrung it; that hand which so many times she had held in friendship, which had performed for her so many services of love; a hand toil-worn and bruised, now emaciated, but still warm with life. Three hours more and it would be cold, a piece of death and corruption. She let it go, and sank into the chair which had been placed for her, behind the painted line.
“Bart, I had to see you to say good-by!”
“I am so glad, Nonna! It is the one more thing I wanted.”
“We have done everything we could, Bart, but it is no use.”
“I know. Mr. Thompson was here, he has just been going. We had a long talk.”
“I have an hour to stay with you, Bart; the Governor granted me that favor.”
“I will leave you, Mrs. Thornwell,” said the warden. “I will have to ask you not to cross the line again. You understand, we have rules, and they must be enforced.”
“I know,” said Cornelia; “I will respect your wishes.” She had heard the prison stories--they had permitted one condemned man to receive a roast chicken from a relative, and it had contained a loaded revolver. “Thank you, Mr. Hendry.” She was as sorry for him as for his captives.
VIII
A guard sat at the entrance to the corridor, fifteen feet from Cornelia’s chair. He could hear everything that was said, but neither she nor Bart heeded him. This was like being alone with God; this was different from human life, where people met, and would meet again by and by. “We have failed, Bart,” she whispered, and he said, in a voice without a quiver: “Do not worry for me, Nonna, I am ready. Nick also is ready. We will die as anarchists should.”
The light in Sacco’s cell had been out; he turned it on, and lay on his cot with his face to the bars, so that he could hear the conversation. “Hello, Nick,” said Cornelia. He answered, with his quick sympathy and consideration for others: “You are too unhappy for us, Nonna. Take it more easy! Plenty fellow have die.” She imagined the twinkle in his eyes--even though now she could see only one eye through the narrow slits. She could see Vanzetti’s whole face, because he was standing at the door, and at that height there was a bend in the bars, making an opening through which he could look.
“Nonna,” he said, “it is more easy to die than to look out through bars like a beast for seven years.”
“Bart, I am going to fight for your good name the rest of my time.”
“Fight for the workers, Nonna; fight so they be free, that other people do not live idle on their hard toil.”
“I will surely do that,” she answered; “but most of all I want to be able to tell people about this case. Tell me the truth, Bart, now that it is the end.”
Said Vanzetti: “I will speak like I would if it was God. I am an innocent man, Nonna; I was never at the South Braintree crime, I was never at the Bridgewater crime. I tell you that in solemn words, for you to say to all the world, all the time, forever. And Nick, he is innocent, he was never at South Braintree like they said. This is the truth, as I hope for joostice, I did never take a umane life, I did never anything that would take umane life, and I work with all my soul for those day when it will not be possible ever for one umane being to kill any other, when all such wickedness and machines for killing lives will be destroyed from the earth. It is because I know that the class system and exploiting of labor is what make such machines to be that I am anarchist. I am against all government, because I know it is tool of exploiting classes, it is not to make joostice in this world, but to make slaves, and to punish the libertarians--as they prove this night upon the bodies of Nick and me.”
There was a pause. When Cornelia spoke again her voice was grave, and her words came slowly, carefully. “Bart, I mean to write what you tell me, so the world will know it. May I say that with reflection and these many years of study, you have changed your views about violence in the class struggle?”
Vanzetti’s answer also came slowly. “You may say I do not wish vee-olence, Nonna. All my life I suffer torture when I think of vee-olence committed upon one body or one soul. But I read the history of all, and this I see, never have the slaves been free because the master was generous; always it is because the slave made some struggle, he made fight for his right. Is it not so?”
“It has been so in the past. But may we not hope for some better way? Think, Bart, before you answer that.”
“I think always, Nonna, it is one thought that I have all my life. I look at the great cruel capitalism--do I think that will give way without fighting? Look this night--Mr. Thompson has told me what he see outside. They make so many thousands, millions--machine-guns, bullets, gas bombs, artilleries--every day new inventions--you think they do not use them? You wish me to say to the worker, ‘You need no fear, you need no preparing for slaughter?’ Shall I say to the young worker, ‘You do not need arming your souls for martyrdom, like Sacco and Vanzetti; Sacco and Vanzetti will be the last martyrs’--can I say that? No, Nonna, I have to say, it will be thousand of martyrs, perhaps millions, it will be most bloody slaughter, before the master class is thrown down, before the workers own the tools and the riches without any master.”
“So that is what I must tell, Bart?”
“That is what all must tell, else I would be traitor, and not good guide for workers; else they would say, ‘Vanzetti has lost his nerve, they have broke him.’ Never will they say that, for me or for Nick.”
“Never!” cried Nick, with his mouth to the bars. “They say we died anarchista.”
“There may be some who wish to avenge your death, Bart, and that would be a dreadful thing, nothing would set back the cause so much. What shall I say about that?”
“Say that I want no such thing, Nonna, we are not such a man to be revenged; we are humble for our cause. What we want is joostice for the worker, freedom for all men on this earth, and we want every libertarian work for that, and not for us, nor for vengeance, which is a wicked thing.”
“May I say that you forgive your enemies, Bart?”
There was a long silence. “Is it a thing that should be forgiven, Nonna--what men has been doing to us?”
“Men are ignorant, Bart--”
“These men are not ignorant, Nonna! Do you think that Judge Thayer is ignorant of what he did? When he call us foul name such as I not like to say before lady, is he ignorant?”
“I think so, Bart; he is one of the most pitiable of human creatures. Think if I were to put it to you, would you have your body free, and be shut up in the narrow dungeon of that man’s mind? Would you consent to be mean, to be a cheat, and eaten up with hatred? When you realize what a blessing has been yours in life, to have the vision, to know the future as you do--can you not pity the poor wretch who lives in darkness of the soul, and behaves like some cruel animal, not a man?”
There was a long silence. Cornelia looked at the face, with its frame of steel bars; it was emaciated, deeply lined by suffering; the dark-brown walrus mustaches drooped, and were partly hidden by the bars. “Remember, Bart, what Comrade Jesus said. He forgave the men who nailed him to the cross.”
“Sure, Nonna, that I can do! Poor fellows in this prison, who are workers too, they have maybe wife and children, how can they stop the evil thing? Many man in this prison knows what I believe, many do not like to take life for the big capitalistas.”
“But the big capitalistas, the men who give the orders, Bart? The judge, the governor, the college president?”
Again a long pause. “I will think about it, Nonna. I would not tell you anything but truth, and it is not easy thing for me to say what you want to hear.”
IX
They talked about the fearsome yet fascinating question of where Bart was to be in two or three hours. “I don’t know, Nonna,” he said. “It is strange idea. If I wake up somewhere, I be very much surprised. What you think?”
“I cannot guess,” she said.
“I think we go back where we come from. It is like a bubble that go back to be water again. This face, this voice, this what you call Vanzetti, I do not think it will be like that anywhere.”
There came a voice from between the next row of bars: “That is all bunk!” (Sacco had not been in America for nineteen years in vain.) “When you are dead, you are dead, you no wake up. For us it come quick, I like quicker. It is what I beg them long time ago.”
Cornelia turned to the speaker. “Is there anything I can do for you, Nick?”
“Take care of wife and kids.”
“You may be sure of that; they will not suffer want.”
“I don’t worry for that,” said Nick, the free-spoken. “If all I want was easy time for them, I would made it myself. Teach the kids what we die for, make them some sense. That is it.”
A pause, and then from the far cell a timid voice: “Good-by, lady.”
“Good-by, Madeiros. Can I do anything to help you?”
“I am not like these fellows,” he said. “I done what they got me for, I deserved it. But they don’t, they are good men; some day it will be known.” The voice was slow and drawling, marred by only a slight accent. Cornelia did not see the speaker, but she had met him before: a thin, undernourished young fellow with a weak but amiable face and small dark mustache. He was only twenty-one, and the doctors said he was a half-wit; the job for which he was to die was the killing of a bank-cashier in a robbery. He admitted it, and some other crimes.
Had he really been at South Braintree, or had he just climbed onto the Sacco-Vanzetti band-wagon at the last moment, with a faint hope of respite? Cornelia had never been able to make up her mind about that. She had watched a curious little drama going on--Madeiros looked up to Sacco and Vanzetti, as to social superiors; they were great men, celebrities, and he was proud to be associated with them. Sacco accepted his homage, but Vanzetti was extremely reserved. The young Portuguese never stopped insisting that both were innocent, and that he was the only guilty man.
Vanzetti spoke about Luigia, and what a joy it had been to see her--but hard for her; such crowds, such excitement, and a terrible end. He had tried to explain to his sister what it was to die as a martyr, not the same as a criminal. She ought to have been able to understand, because she believed in Jesus; but Jesus to her was something far away and terrifying, to be dealt with by the priests. A wicked thing, that ecclesiastical system, which enslaved the minds of the poor, and made the name of God something which libertarians could not speak.
The prison authorities had been pleading with Sacco and Vanzetti to let a priest or some kind of clergyman administer to them. It seemed to the authorities dreadful to kill men and have their souls go to hell! It was the first time the thing had happened in eighteen years, so they said. But the three men stood firm--Madeiros taking a chance with the others. They would never surrender the integrity of their minds. “Giammai!” cried Nick; and added: “That says, ‘Not on your life,’ Nonna.” He was gay, being soon to get the freedom which he had craved for so many years. Impossible to crush that spirit of steel springs; and for the body, even though weakened by confinement and fasting, they would need an extra voltage.
X
Cornelia wore a wrist-watch, and every now and then her glance would be drawn towards it. The minute-hand seemed to be stealing time from her, it would take jumps when she was not watching. Vanzetti sat on his cot, and peering with one eye through the bars, saw a tear stealing down the old woman’s cheek. “Nonna,” he exclaimed, quickly, “I want you do something for me.”
“What is it, Bart?”
“Something very great, a last thing--something hard.”
“Tell me.”
“I want you to not be sad.”
“Oh, Bart!”
“It is easy to die. It is little thing--only for friends, for so many women, grieving, weeping. It is--what you say, futile. Is most futile thing in the whole world to have grief. Is it not so?”
“Yes, Bart--but--”
“Listen. I speak for all three. We are soldiers. It is our business to die. What for do you weep? It is our job.”
“I will try, Bart.”
Vanzetti’s voice had taken on a note of sternness that Cornelia had heard a few times, when in his imagination he was going to battle with the capitalist class. “You remember, Nonna, we publish book, our gruppo, ‘Faccia à Faccia col Nemico.’ All right. It is what we are now. It is our dream, it is our life. What for do we ask you to weep? Coraggio! Coraggio!” He went back to his childhood language when he was deeply moved; and his voice stiffened Cornelia’s bent spine.
“Amica mia, you have been good soul to us. You have done more than help, you have onderstood. Now onderstand once again--is it too much?”
“I will do my best.”
“We choose this death. Long ago we know it, we see him come. You be anarchista militante, you die. You die by hangman of capitalist class. All right, we choose. Every man have got to die, it is no great news, it happen each day. Poor workingmen, rich capitalistas, all. But to live forever, that is not so easy; to speak to all the world--how many time do it happen to poor workingmen? To a couple of wops? Did ever you hear such thing?”
“No, Bart, you are right.”
“Our life, it has been success; it is victory, like never we have dream. Men stop, they say, ‘What is this anarchist? What is this men believe, that they die so glad? What is this joostice? Have I got it? Have I got freedom, or am I slave like they tell me?’ He ask, and he begin to think--million men begin to think--it is something your great Go-vérnor give us, something he cannot take! Our crown, our victory! Is it not so?”
“Yes, yes, Bart!”
“Viva l’anarchia!” came the voice of Nick.
“Our bodies they kill, they make our souls immortal. Young workers take up our cry--you see, Nonna, only wait, it grows all over the world, the revolt of the worker, the message that men be free, that they work for joostice, not for parasite. And we have helped, we have done a part. Only one thing more to do, is to die brave; to walk to the chair, smile, speak the truth to the end. So, amica mia, help us; no sad thought, only coraggio! Tell our friends it is joy, not grief, it is success, not failure.”
There is a contagion that spreads in human souls, and shakes the thrones of emperors and kings. Cornelia’s hands were clenched and her teeth set. “All right, Bart, I will do what you say. I will be with you to the end, and afterwards.”
The warden stood in the doorway; and Cornelia rose to her feet, not waiting for him to help her. “All right, Mr. Hendry, I am ready. I have had a worthwhile hour. May I shake hands with my boys once more?”
“Yes, Mrs. Thornwell.” He came to help her, but she did not wait for him. She took Vanzetti’s hand in a firm, strong grip. “Good-by, for the last time, Bart. You have taught me more than any of the great persons I have met in my life. I shall remember every word you said to me.”
“Good-by, Nonna. I thank you. Thank you for the good help.”
“Good-by, Nick. You have been a brave fellow. You have done your job.”
“Good-by, Nonna. Good-by to wife and kids. Teach them for me--what I believe.”
Then Madeiros. He put out his hand, and Cornelia made no difference between a hero and a criminal. “Good-by, my son. I hope the next world treats you better than this one.”
“Good-by, lady.” He was a timid bank robber, who found this an incomprehensible world. Anarchists sought to overthrow the rich, and then the rich came to shake their hands!
Cornelia went to the door. The guard had risen, ready to help her if need be; but she was doing her stunt. “Thank you, Mr. Hendry, these three soldiers have given me back my strength.” She turned, and called: “Good-by, dear friends! Good luck to you--and to your cause!” To a chorus of good-by shouts in English and Italian she walked through the death-chamber, past the chair with the gaping arms and the dangling leather straps; her little head held high, her steps firm and proud. Through the prison yard she went, steady, amid the beams of the drunken searchlights, staggering this way and that; past the cell-blocks, with white faces looking out, eight hundred and eighty-one human beasts, roaring now and then, “Let them out!” Into the warden’s home, and through the front door; through the group of policemen, and into the waiting car with the anxious women.
“Mother! Mother!” They started to make a fuss, after the fashion of families. She sank back in the seat and whispered, “Let me be quiet! I have been talking with God.”
That happens also to families in Boston now and then. They thought, “It has been too much for her mind!” and were frightened into silence. They could not realize how this strange idea would haunt the minds of men all over the world in this dreadful hour. John Haynes Holmes, a clergyman, formerly of Boston, was writing at that moment a “Ballad of Charlestown Gaol”:
_There’s a chair for you, Vanzetti, In a cold and empty room; A chair aloof and lonely, Like a spectre in the gloom; A chair with open arms and wide, To welcome you to doom._
_They’ve made this chair, Vanzetti-- Good men, and strong, and true-- To manifest the will of God On poor men such as you; To show the Lord Christ lives again-- And dies, the Lord Christ, too!_
XXIV. THE TRIUMPH
I
Even at that late hour there were men and women who could not make up their minds to let Sacco and Vanzetti die. There were protestants who would not cease marching. In Salem Street, in the North End of Boston, a thousand or more Italians gathered, declaring their intention to march to the Bunker Hill monument and hold a meeting during the execution. Mike Crowley’s mounted men charged into the midst of them, scattering them in every direction, crushing many. The same thing happened in Thompson Square, and in the roped-off area near the prison. Here seven men and women broke through the police lines, singing the “International,” and lifting their printed protests, in defiance of all that military might. “Hail, Sacco and Vanzetti! The élite of the world salute you as heroes!” One of the seven was a war veteran, and when the police fell upon him, “Oh, boy,” they cried, “wait till we get you in jail!” A traitor to the army system, they would teach him a lesson he would remember! They beat three men, one of them insensible, the others nearly so.
Also there was another campaign before the Governor--at half-past ten at night. William G. Thompson had come down from his vacation in New Hampshire, and was making an appeal, based on the Governor’s fixed prejudice concerning Vanzetti at the Plymouth trial. Over and over again, for months, Fuller had been talking about the fact that Vanzetti had not taken the stand in his own behalf. That very morning he had voiced dark rumors about Vahey and Graham, the lawyers who had defended Vanzetti at Plymouth; if they were not bound by the code which forbids lawyers to betray a client, they could tell dreadful things about Vanzetti.
The substance of this proposition had been telephoned to William G. Thompson, up in New Hampshire, and he had motored to Boston, and gone to see Vanzetti early in the evening--a long conference, the substance of which he later published in the Atlantic Monthly, He asked if Vanzetti would be willing to permit Vahey to tell the truth about the case, and his dealings with his clients. The answer was Vanzetti’s usual charge, as to how his case had been conducted, which he was certain had cost him his life. Now the lawyer came to see Governor Fuller, bringing Vanzetti’s message, that he was willing for Vahey to say anything he knew, provided that the interview took place in the presence of Thompson, or some other friend in whom Vanzetti had confidence. So now the way was open to a “show-down,” and would the Governor follow his own suggestion? Surely fair play required that!
The answer of Fuller was to make no answer--a trick which public personages have to learn. Silence! Out there on the other side of the Charles River was a miniature army on duty, and a prison staff about to put those wops out of the world, so that Fuller and his class could “sleep better.” All traffic stopped over main highways between the two cities; thousands of persons, living near the prison, illegally shut up in their homes for the night; a million dollars invested by Boston merchants and manufacturers in riot and bomb insurance; the newspaper wires run into the prison, the witnesses summoned, the traveling expenses of the executioner incurred for the second time--and all that trouble and expense to be brought to nought, while the Governor carried on a debate with a bunch of “meddlesome Matties” in secret sympathy with terrorists! In the formula which had been current in the sporting world when “Allie” Fuller was a bicycle-racer: “Not on your tin-type!”
II
At a quarter before midnight William G. Thompson came out from the Governor’s chamber, and to the waiting reporters expressed his solemn conviction that innocent men were about to be executed. A strange event--a great lawyer breaking the rule of his lifetime, defying Boston legal proprieties and “trying the case in the newspapers!” He would give a long interview, defending his clients, and telling the Vahey episode, and much of what Vanzetti had said to him in prison.
Meantime--even at that hour--one more protest! Francis Fisher Kane, former U. S. Attorney for Pennsylvania, had been waiting for two hours to see the Governor to make one last appeal concerning the Department of Justice files. He persuaded the doorman to take in his card, and the Governor granted five minutes. Mr. Kane presented a fact which had just come to his knowledge; President Lowell had stated to a friend that the files were of no significance, and could not have affected the decision of his Commission. Mr. Kane now strove to make this matter clear to the Governor. The files would show that the Department of Justice had been watching Sacco and Vanzetti by means of “informers,” considering them as dangerous anarchists. Mr. Kane himself knew exactly what that meant, having been a Federal prosecutor, in charge of the watching of certain anarchists; he had resigned his position, in protest against the things he saw being done during the “Red raids.” He could certify that Sacco and Vanzetti had had good reason to be afraid for their lives on the night of their arrest; and thus that famous “consciousness of guilt” theory of Judge Thayer was knocked out. The arrested men had a kind of guilt to be conscious of, entirely different from that of the South Braintree crime!
So the lawyer argued; and it was like water falling upon a granite stone. For seven years the authorities of Massachusetts had had these facts before them, and had resolutely shut their eyes; the reason being that, in their secret hearts, they desired the death of anarchists quite as ardently as the death of bandits.
The telephone ringing; the group of New York lawyers who had set out to try to reach Williamstown by motor-car, but realized that it was too late. John Finerty on the wire, to beg the Governor, in the name of common decency, to put off the execution for just a couple of hours, until they could reach Judge Anderson and see if he would act upon their appeal. The Governor’s answer was that Mr. Finerty should communicate with Attorney-General Reading, who was in charge of legal matters that night. Mr. Finerty called Mr. Reading’s office and learned that Mr. Reading had gone to the Governor’s office about the matter. He called the Governor’s office and learned that Mr. Reading had gone back to his own office. He called Mr. Reading’s office and learned that Mr. Reading had not arrived. Astonishing agility on the part of a high official, in spite of his pockets being stuffed with the money of the Decimo Club and the “L. A. W.” and other corporations which feared trouble from the legal department of the great Commonwealth! Mr. Finerty was not able to hear Mr. Reading’s voice.
The weary Governor rose from his desk, and put on his hat. It had been a strain; his face was drawn with exhaustion--impossible to conceal it now. “No statement, boys,” to the newspaper men. His guards closed about him, and he went down to his Packard car, under the Mt. Vernon Street arch of the State House, closed all that day to traffic. The guards saluted, they fell back and dropped the ropes; a police-car in front, another in the rear, with riot-guns ready for instant action--the little procession rolled out into the night, on its way to the summer home in New Hampshire.
III
Cornelia, returned to her apartment, found Betty waiting. So she sent off her daughters and son-in-law. “I am perfectly all right now. That visit was what I needed. No use to keep you up. Thanks for what you did, it made everything all right.” She lay on the bed, and told Betty about her visit, and every word that had been spoken. Betty told about the meeting she had attended, and how the crowds were behaving. It was like war time, tens of thousands of people in front of the bulletin boards; and when some item of bad news came, you would hear a moan, a sob of mass-agony. Apparently the public was beginning to realize--at the last moment--too late!
“I am going to be able to stand it, Betty. I have got to stand it, for Bart’s sake.” Betty was glad to hear it; she was prepared to carry her own burden, but no more. “Yes, yes, it’s all right,” the old woman went on. “It is what Bart and Nick wanted.” But even as she said it, there was a trembling at the lips, and a look of terror in her eyes.
An hour and more still to be passed. Betty began hastily to tell the news. She had stopped at headquarters: she told who was there, but dodged away from describing the weeping and anguish. Powers Hapgood had been missing for hours, and word had just come that he was shut up in “Psychopathic”; Joe Randall had hurried off to fetch Dr. Myerson, to get Powers out. Creighton Hill had made a trip to Maine, with two clergymen, to get another clergyman to make an affidavit concerning Thayer’s prejudice. But Fuller wouldn’t pay any attention to it, of course.
Cornelia was only half hearing. “Betty, do you suppose the Governor can be meaning to put it off again?”
“I don’t know, Grannie. How can you tell, with that beast?” Never if they lived a thousand years would the women of the defense forgive him for the night of anguish he had caused them, by withholding the reprieve until twenty minutes before the time for the execution.
Gossip wouldn’t do, Betty realized; she must tap the deeper layers of the human soul. “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity,” so the evangelists tell us; now Betty Alvin, hard and grim little realist, must become a prophet and a saint, like Bart! She must point out that stone walls do not a prison make, and how they that kill the body only glorify the soul. She must make real to both her grandmother and herself what this night’s events would mean to the future; a consecration to the radical movement, a purifying of the faith of all of them, a spiritual rebirth for Boston. “Oh, Betty, is it really so? Won’t they forget all about it, and go back to their radios and their jazz?”
“Some will, Grannie; but some of us aren’t going to forget this long fight.”
“Seven years!” Cornelia whispered. “Seven years!”
Betty answered that it had taken those years to make the case; to get public attention centered on it, to get the great ones of Boston to notice two wops. “Don’t you see what it’s for, Grannie--to dramatize the class struggle! To make it so plain that every child can see it! To make it into a formula, that you can say in three words, and have everybody understand it--everywhere, all over the world, for all future time! ‘Sacco and Vanzetti!’ And right here in our great and prosperous America, that is making so many automobiles and bathtubs and books of etiquette! Right here in Boston, that is so moral! Don’t you see how important it is to have the capitalist class electrocute its own lies?”
“Betty! Betty! When will men stop killing?”
“When we end exploitation, Grannie dear; and Bart and Nick are doing the job! Don’t you see the glory of this case--it kills off the liberals! Before this, it was possible to argue that injustice was an accident, just an oversight--in a country that was so busy making automobiles and bathtubs and books of etiquette! But now here’s a test--we settle the question forever! We take our very best--not merely cheap politicians, but our great ones! Our biggest business man! Our most cultured university president! Our supreme court judges--even the liberal ones! We prove them all alike--they all know what flag they fight under, who serves out their rations! They all take their places in the ranks, with every button in position, and all of them washed behind the ears! They all obey the great capitalist drill-sergeant, and not a man deserts to the enemy--not one single man!”
A quarter to twelve. “Betty, if they were going to put it off, they’d have had to say so by now.”
“Yes, blessed dear, I’m afraid so.”
“And somebody would have let us know!”
“Yes, surely they would.”
“They’ll let us know when it’s over?”
“Joe promised he’d phone at once.” Then, in desperation: “Grannie, did you hear about the necklace which Bart gave to Mr. Thompson? He took the ten dollars you sent him, and bought some things the prisoners had made, and gave Mr. Thompson a necklace of beads for his wife, and Mr. Thompson broke down and cried. They say he can’t talk about it without crying. It’ll ruin him as a lawyer.”
“Bart and Nick were right about it all along,” said Cornelia. “They knew more about Boston than we did.”
“That is something that touched Mr. Thompson. Nick had insisted he’d never get anywhere with the courts, and to-day Mr. Thompson thought that Nick would remind him of it. But Nick didn’t say a word; he knew how much it would hurt.”
Twelve o’clock. Cornelia, white-faced, her hands clasped together, and her voice a faint whimper. “Betty, they must be in the death-chamber now.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Remember what you promised Bart!”
“I know, I know--but I wonder--how long does it take?”
“Not very long, dear, they make it quick, they are as polite as Fuller.”
But somehow that wasn’t the right thing to say. Betty caught the poor trembling hands, and began to whisper: “Grannie, dear, don’t let yourself go! We all need our strength, we have a whole world to change.”
“All right, I won’t, I won’t! How long does--how long do they keep the current on?”
“I don’t know, two or three minutes. But the victims don’t know it, so what’s the use thinking about such things!”
“They must be doing it now! Oh, Betty--tell me something to think about!”
“They are brave men, Grannie. They have lived the life they wanted to live, and they don’t want us crying over them. Think of all the people who get killed--so many in needless ways--that we can put a stop to when we have learned what Bart and Nick have to teach us.” So Betty, rushing on, a little stump-speech--but all in vain. She had to keep squeezing the poor frail hands, and saying over and over again the simple elemental idea, that Bart had forbidden Cornelia to grieve, and she had promised not to. After all, Bart’s life was his own, and if he chose to become one of the world’s great martyrs, who had a right to object?
IV
Cornelia could be got to listen to that, to sit staring, like a hypnotized rabbit. The trouble was that the clock on the mantel-piece became hypnotized, too, and the hands refused to move; all time stood still, there was no way to get it past. The world hung suspended in a void of suffering--that very hell which Father Murphy, the prison chaplain, had been telling about, where pain endured forever.
Some magic spell had been woven over the minds and souls of tens of thousands, perhaps millions of persons, scattered over every part of the earth; never had there been such a phenomenon since the world began. They sat in rooms and stared at each other, they stood in front of bulletin boards and clenched their hands, or maybe bit their finger-nails; they went walking blindly about the streets, not knowing where. In whatever part of the world they might be--in Boston or Los Angeles, Buenos Ayres or Paris or Tokio--they had figured the time, and were saying the same words as Cornelia Thornwell: “They must be doing it now! They must have them in the chair! How long does the current take?” And one and all they noticed that extraordinary phenomenon--time stood still, minutes refused to pass as they normally should.
The telephone ringing; Betty had to let go of her grandmother’s hands to take the receiver. Cornelia watched her face, reading the fates there. No need to hear a word; Cornelia knew it was Joe, and he was saying, “It’s all over.” “Yes, sweetheart,” said Betty, in a voice as even as if she were accepting an invitation for lunch. “Yes, we’re all right. Grannie went over and had a talk with them both, and she’s feeling stronger. But you’d better come home right away--yes, dear, we might need you. Please do.” She hung up quickly, so that Joe might not hear the dreadful burst of anguish from the poor old woman on the bed.
Betty dug under the wasted body, and got hold of the hands, and made the agonized soul sit up and look at her. “Grannie, listen to me now! You don’t realize--it’s all over! Stop and think what that means--Bart and Nick can’t suffer any more! Nobody can punish them, nobody can torture them--ever again! They aren’t in jail! They are free!”
So on and on, until the idea did actually penetrate Cornelia’s mind. The sobbing ceased, and she sat staring ahead of her, as if at an apparition in the room. “It is really so! They can’t do any more to them!”
“Grannie, blessed dear, it is what Nick has been saying all along, and we never had sense enough to realize it! Their job is done, and they are all right!”
V
At ten o’clock the chief electrician and his assistant had tested the death chair and pronounced everything in order. Then came the executioner, to make his inspection. Elliot was this gentleman’s name; he preferred a retired life, on account of anarchist bombs, but the clamor of newspapers had brought him into the limelight; they published his picture, and a list of the human beings he had killed. The “false execution” of twelve days ago had compelled him to make a journey for nothing; very annoying, and he was hoping that now there would be no hitch, he would get his seven hundred and fifty dollars.
Father Murphy came to the death cells, to make his last offer of eternal life. Absolutely without charge, and merely by a few passes of the hands and the speaking of a few words, he was willing to deliver these three men from the otherwise certain fate of perpetual roasting upon a brimstone and sulphur fire. Nearly three hundred years ago the philosopher Pascal had presented an unanswerable argument on the subject: the procedure would do you great good if it were valid, and no harm if it were not valid. But Vanzetti answered that it would do harm to those whom he left on earth, to be more tightly riveted in the chains of superstition. So, a few minutes before midnight, Father Murphy went to the officers’ club of the prison and remarked to the newspapermen, “There seems to be nothing for me to do, so I am going home.”
That clubroom was like the “pit” in the stock exchange, with more than a hundred reporters scrambling for every scrap of news. Many telephones were installed, and eighteen telegraphers sat at eighteen machines, to feed the curiosity of a ravenous world. The service included direct cable connections with all the other five continents. The representative of the Associated Press had been honored by an invitation to witness the execution, and was pledged to furnish the details to his colleagues.
There were, according to law, a number of official witnesses, whose duty it was to certify to the Governor that his orders had been carried out. They were in readiness, and the warden now led them to the death-house. Chairs were lined against the wall of the execution chamber, facing the electric chair, and the worthies took their seats. The big warden, with plump round face and little black mustache and narrow slits for eyes; a well-known Boston surgeon; the physician of the prison; the surgeon general of the national guard, who looked like a college professor; the medical examiner of Suffolk County, who looked like a romantic poet with tousled hair; the sheriff of Norfolk County, a bald-headed, stern-faced old Puritan, who had had Sacco in charge for seven years, and Vanzetti off and on, at great expense to his office--he was one of those who had expressed their sentiment by piling up the desk of Judge Thayer with flowers, on the day that learned jurist delivered his charge to the Dedham jury, and explained the nobility of loyalty.
There was a telephone against the wall of the execution chamber, and the representative of the Associated Press took his stand by it; the wire ran to the warden’s office, and from there a telegraph operator would relay every word to the crowd of reporters. In this way they would learn when each man entered the death chamber, when the current was turned on, and when the death was officially announced. Later the “A.P. man” would go over to the officers’ club and give the details.
The executioner stood behind a screen in one corner, to the left of the death chair; he could look over the screen, and see when it was time for him to earn his money. Two guards stood by the door leading to the cell corridor, and when the warden signaled that all was ready, they stepped back to the first cell, and unlocked the door. Madeiros lay asleep--not setting much value upon his last moments. The guards awakened him, stood him on his feet, and led him, half dazed, into the execution chamber, closing the door behind them, out of kindness for the occupants of the other two cells.
The victim had on short gray trousers, with a slit cut up each leg, and a blue shirt with short sleeves, made especially for the occasion. He was seated in the chair, and as quickly as possible the deputy warden and a guard buckled the straps which would hold his hands and feet immovable. The electrodes, from which the current was to enter the body, were fastened, one to each leg, and a third, the headpiece, covering the entire top of the head; they contained wet sponges, to afford perfect transmission.
They tied a bandage over the victim’s eyes, and then stepped back; all was ready. It was the warden’s part to signal with his hand to the executioner, who would then move a switch. Since this did the actual killing, the theory was that the executioner alone was responsible, and for carrying this heavy responsibility the Commonwealth paid him the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars for each of three motions of the hand--plus traveling expenses from his retreat in New York.
He made the first motion, and there was a whir of the current, and the body of Madeiros gave a sudden leap, which would have jerked it from the chair if it had not been that the straps were heavy. Human flesh became of the rigidity of steel, and stayed that way for several minutes, with a current of nineteen hundred volts passing through it. A ghastly odor of burning hair spread through the death chamber.
The current was turned off, the body sank back limp into the chair, and the warden signed to the medical examiners, who stepped forward with their stethoscopes. At nine minutes and thirty-five seconds past midnight they pronounced the Wrentham bank robber dead, and the body was lifted from the chair and carried to one of three newly painted slabs hidden behind a screen in the death chamber. Nothing could exceed the sense of propriety of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or the decency with which it prepared for the elimination of its enemies.
VI
The door leading to the cells was opened again, and the two guards went in to the second cell. Nicola Sacco was not asleep, but waiting, to do his last duty as a revolutionist. He walked out between the guards; he entered the execution chamber, and looked about him at the row of solemn witnesses, the deputies, the chair, and the screen with the face peering over it. His own face was white and haggard, his lips set, his whole expression that of defiance. He walked directly to the chair and sat down; then, as the guards began to adjust the straps, he lifted himself slightly, raised his voice, and said, in what came as a shout in that still brick-walled chamber of death: “Viva l’anarchia!”
(“You see!” said all Massachusetts, when they read about it with their morning coffee and codfish balls. “We told you so! We knew it all along!”)
The guards paid no attention to any words. They went on with swift fingers, as if they feared that some one might come to stop them at the last moment. When they were through, and stepped back, Sacco opened his lips again, and the warden withheld the signal. “Farewell, my wife and children and all my friends!” Then, as the warden was in the act of lifting his hand: “Good evening, gentlemen. Farewell, Mother.”
The cue was given, and the executioner moved the switch, and the body leaped so that it was like a blow against the straps. Twenty-one hundred volts was the executioner’s estimate of what it would take to rid Massachusetts of this wiry peasant; the amperage was from seven to nine, and it was nineteen minutes and two seconds after midnight when the medical examiners pronounced the duty done. The body of Nicola Sacco was lifted from the chair, and carried behind the screen and laid upon the second slab.
Then for the third and last time the door into the cell corridor was opened, and the guards entered. Bartolomeo Vanzetti had sat upon his cot alone, knowing what was happening in the adjoining chamber, but it had not shaken his nerve; he had had seven years in which to work out his system of self-discipline. “This is our career and our triumph.” He rose from his cot, and walked with firm steps, the guards holding him, one by each arm. When they entered the execution chamber, the guards released him, and he looked at them--men whom he had known for a long time, and whom he had taught to respect him, no longer to call him a wop. They were poor fellows, who maybe had wives and children to keep, and could not help what they were doing; so he turned to them first, as became a proletarian martyr. “Good-by,” he said to each, and held out his hand to each in turn, and shook their hands firmly.
Then he turned to Deputy Warden Hogsett, and took both his hands and wrung them. “Good-by, I thank you for your courtesy to me.” And then to the warden, a big towering figure. Vanzetti was quiet and at ease, as if he were welcoming visitors to his home. “Warden, I want to thank you for all that you have done for me.” He held out his hand, and the warden took it.
(“Jesus!” he said, to one of the reporters afterwards. “He shook my hand, and then I had to raise it to give the signal!”)
Vanzetti walked to the chair and sat down. Then he spoke--words which he had made the subject of much thought. “I wish to tell you that I am innocent and never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this one, but of all. I am an innocent man.”
The guards, well trained, went on with their work, paying no attention to eloquence. The electrodes were adjusted, the straps made fast. As a guard started to apply the bandage to Vanzetti’s eyes, he spoke again; it was the question which Cornelia had asked him, and to which he had promised an answer. He gave it with all the world for an audience. “I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
The guards stepped back, and the warden gave the signal; the executioner moved the switch, and the body of Bartolomeo Vanzetti leaped as the others had done. Nineteen hundred and fifty volts were estimated to be sufficient for this less robust person, a dreamer and a man of words rather than of action. Many, many words he had both spoken and written, but now no more. The current was turned off, and the medical men made their examination, and at twenty-six minutes and fifty-five seconds past midnight they pronounced that the last spark of anarchism had been extinguished from the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The warden had a solemn formula to recite, but his voice almost failed him, and not all the witnesses heard the words: “Under the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been legally carried out.”
The third body was laid on the slab, and the doors of the execution chamber were opened--it had grown very hot, with the many volts of electricity and the tense emotions of martyrs. Also, the odor of burned hair made one ill; the night breeze was very welcome. The guards and witnesses went outside, and wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and from the backs of their wilted collars. “Christ!” said the deputy warden. “Did you hear what he said? He forgave me! Now what do you make of that?”
VII
The representative of the Associated Press hastened to the officers’ club. Not often does one man carry a message to the whole world. He entered the room with the hundred ravening reporters, and had to mount a chair so that all might have an equal chance to hear. “No features,” he said. “Entirely colorless.” The proper professional air; if his “assignment” had been Mount Calvary, he would have said the same. If Jesus had raised a row at the last moment--if he had tried to escape, and had knocked down the captain of the centurions--that would have been “hot news.” Or if he had cursed God, instead of merely asking why God had forsaken him. Obvious enough that God would not pay any attention to the leader of a Jewish rabble, a common workingman, born in a stable in the flea-infested village of Bethlehem!
So likewise this death of Sacco and Vanzetti--“no features.” No, they hadn’t confessed--except that Sacco had confessed to being an anarchist. He had cried: “Viva l’anarchia!” (“How the hell do you spell it? Has it got a ‘k’?”). No one had collapsed, or made what you would call a scene. Sacco’s complexion had been white, you might almost say green. (“The way Mary Splaine described him--I remember at the Dedham trial.”) Vanzetti had shaken hands with everybody, very politely. (“Anarchist propaganda! A grandstand play!”) He had said--the bored correspondent consulted his bunch of papers, on which he had jotted down a few words--he said that he forgave everybody--no, it was “some people.” (“The little infant Jesus! Ain’t they lambs, these Reds?”)
The room was gray with tobacco smoke, an inferno of heat--the windows having been boarded up, for fear somebody might “throw something in.” The clamor was deafening--the clicking of eighteen telegraph keys, and the voices of men shouting over the telephones, each trying to hear himself above the uproar--that competition which is the life of capitalism. Men standing against the wall scribbling, or writing on their knees, each hoping to file his words the first. The three big press associations would take care of the main outlines of the news for all the papers of the country; they had already sent three “flashes” on each execution; now they would follow with details. But a hundred papers had sent special correspondents, and these pleaded for “human interest stuff,” hounding those who had witnessed the events.
The warden had gone to his office; he was gray, and the perspiration could not be kept from his forehead, nor the trembling from his whole body. He invited his deputy to have a drink with him, and opened his cupboard for the purpose; but there entered Mike Crowley with the police commissioner, a blue-blood, appointed by the Governor. The warden didn’t think it quite right for that high-up personage to see him indulging his appetite at this moment, so he hastily shut the cupboard door again. He had to sit down in a chair. The deputy kept saying: “He shook both my hands! And he forgave me! I never saw such a thing! I couldn’t conceive of it!”
The news was spread by a thousand telegraph wires, and in a hundred cities great crowds learned it from the bulletin boards of newspapers; for the most part in silence, but sometimes with groans and sobs. The Boston Evening Transcript had kept its broadcasting station open--radio WBET--entertaining the listeners with music and miscellaneous news all evening. The comfortable population of New England sat in their easy chairs and absorbed the easy entertainment: the WBET Troupers in “Not Quite Such a Goose,” a comedy in one act; Boots and His Nighthawks, dance music; the Klassay Boys; the Handy Instrumental Trio; Doc Wassermann’s Orchestra; and the Correct Time.
In the news that day all kinds of thrills: Ed Farrell’s hitting had been a large factor as the Braves won three straight from the Cubs; two school boys were leading the field in the first half of the qualifying round for the amateur golf title; a girl tennis queen had won an impressive victory in New York, and the French Davis cup team had arrived in Boston. More serious items: St. Mark’s Church had benefited by the will of a millionaire manufacturer of extracts; eight hundred Catholic teachers from a hundred and thirty-five parochial schools were in convention; the city council had voted three hundred thousand dollars for a golf links; the wife of a moving picture favorite had obtained a divorce from her husband, after charging him eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his freedom. The flappers of Boston listened, and reflected: “If I could get to marry somebody like that, I could live on the alimony the rest of my life.” Radio central station WBET, the Boston Evening Transcript: “The juice was turned off, and Vanzetti was officially pronounced dead at twelve, twenty-six, fifty-five. The orchestra will now play, ‘The End of a Perfect Day.’”
VIII
In every great capital of the world there were mass meetings and protests that night. In London a mob marched upon Buckingham Palace, and had to be ridden down by mounted men--quite as if it were Boston Common. In Berlin there were a score of meetings, ending with parades. In Geneva the demonstrants raided the American embassy, and when clubbed away, broke the windows of the League of Nations Palace. Even in far-off Tokio the American ambassador had to receive a deputation of labor leaders, and explain that he had no control over executions in Massachusetts.
In Paris there had been a general strike, and on the night of the execution there were street demonstrations, with mobs shouting curses at Americans whenever they met them--which was frequently. An American playwright and his wife asked for police protection, and when the official learned that they knew German, he advised them to speak it for a while. An odd freak of history--only ten years since the battle of the Argonne, and here was a man who had taken part in it, being told to speak the language of the Boche!
It was dawn when the workers of Europe got the news, and they went to their tasks with hearts blazing. To them it was a personal matter, for they had friends in America, and knew the attitude of native New England to its foreign workers. There were guards before all American embassies and consulates, and few escaped without broken windows. In London forty persons were injured in the rioting; in Australia eighteen hundred were discharged for taking part in a strike; in South Africa the American flag was burned on the steps of the town hall of Johannesburg.
On the evening of the 23rd in Paris huge masses of workers were driven about the streets by the police. They would scatter, and then reassemble, wherever Americans were to be met. They raided the cabarets of Montmartre, and showered the patrons with broken glass. The “Moulin Rouge,” shrine of tourist culture, was demolished, and when the panic-stricken patrons got outside, they found their automobiles overturned and the tires cut. Unkind and inexplicable it seemed to amiable globe-trotters, who had sent over their boys and won the war for the French, and now, finding that the French could not pay their debts, were permitting them to work it off by entertaining several hundred thousand bond-holders every summer. Large round gentlemen in golf-pants, with horn-rimmed glasses and rosy cheeks, ate the best food in the country, and drank the best wines, and had the best dress-makers to decorate their bouncing jolly wives, or the lean tall ones who took culture seriously. They rode about in rows on large motorbuses, with guide-books in hand, admiring indiscriminately; they scattered money to right and left, paying double prices, determined to have the best of everything in the world.
The wage-slaves of French factories, half starved for generations, read in their socialist and communist papers of the death of Sacco and Vanzetti; and in the same issue they read how the wife of an American millionaire was introducing a new fashion in carved emeralds from India, of which jewelers in the rue de la Paix had a few rare specimens. The Chicago harvesting-machine queen had paid approximately eighteen million francs--the life-time earnings of several hundred French workingmen--for a necklace containing eighty-nine such jewels, minutely carved in relief to represent events in Hindu history. She had been the sensation at Biarritz when she appeared on Baron Fascini’s yacht, wearing this necklace as the sole ornament on her newest Oxford bags pajamas suit of natural colored pongee, and a royal blue jacket with gold buttons. Such munificence made prosperity for all Paris, and kept many thousands of workers alive; yet they refused to love their benefactors, but called them dirty names, and threw stones through the windows of the cafés which exhibited the depravities of Paris to the Puritan trade.
The wisest of Frenchmen had written a letter to Governor Fuller. “I say to you, beware of making martyrs. This is the unforgivable crime that nothing can wipe out and that weighs on generation after generation.” But alas, the name of Anatole France meant nothing to a salesman of motor-cars who read the Saturday Evening Post; that letter had doubtless been burned in the furnaces, along with all the others. And now Massachusetts had made her martyrs, and stood upon her pedestal of self-righteousness. The more the world hated her, the more proud she would be, to be right while everybody else was wrong. “Massachusetts, there she is!” said Daniel Webster, darling of the “golden mob.” “Behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past at least is secure.” So the golden ones would continue to orate, while the names of her two martyrs swelled to a battle-cry of the disinherited of the earth. Until that day when the workers of Europe began to take Joe Randall’s advice and repudiate the debts!
IX
The corpses were in a mortuary, still held by the authorities. Then, horror of horrors, the friends of the defense learned that the bodies were being mutilated, the hearts and brains of both men were to be turned over to a medical school--of all places, Harvard University! It was a custom with the bodies of executed men, not a special indignity planned for these two--so the newspapers explained. Did the authorities have a right to do it? Or did they just do it? Nobody seemed to know. To the friends of the two martyrs it was the final insult--they could not have been more outraged if they had seen the august president of Harvard thumbing his nose at them.
“What do they want with their hearts and brains?” cried Cornelia; and Betty, the ferocious, explained matters. Harvard had so many millions upon millions of endowments, and had not succeeded in producing a great man for at least a generation. So many hundreds of professors, of every kind of subject on earth, and they couldn’t teach anything worth while! Now they wanted the hearts and brains of two wops, to see if they could find out the secret of greatness. If they studied Nick’s heart, they might learn about courage; from Bart’s they might find a clew to social idealism, and the chemical constituents of faith. This fancy gave great joy to Betty, who went on to picture the medicos peering through microscopes, and making analyses in test-tubes, to find out the ways of genius. Mr. Lowell studying blood-counts, to learn how to put a little human interest into a speech or an essay! The heads of the English department making drawings of the cells in Vanzetti’s cortex, to find out how a wop had become a great master of English prose!
The mutilated bodies were turned over to the relatives at last. Thousands of persons wanted to view them, and pay their last tribute; but the proprietors of the building in which the defense had two dingy rooms refused to permit it to happen there; to make sure, they nailed a joist up and down through the middle of the entrance to their building, which they figured would keep out coffins! So arrangements were made with an Italian undertaker on Hanover Street; and the moment it was known that the bodies were there, ten thousand persons gathered, and the police had to rope off the entire block, and let in only a few at a time.
Also they had to start clubbing and jailing again. For Mary Donovan came with another placard, containing those words which three or four weeks ago she had nailed to one of the elm trees of the Common: “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” She set that placard in front of the two coffins, while the newspaper photographers prepared to take pictures of it. And of course the police wouldn’t permit that; had they not abolished free speech in Boston in order to prevent those words from being put before the public? A policeman grabbed Mary’s placard, and she, being Irish like himself, was not above fighting for her own. Other “cops” came running, and dragged Mary off to jail; and then of course they had to club the crowds, to keep them from crying “Shame!”
The friends of the defense desired to have a parade to the crematory where the bodies were to be burned. Many persons desired to go, and why should they not walk? So began negotiations with officials of this city of terror, for the right to walk eight miles to a crematory. The first stipulation was that the walkers must go by the most direct route, which would take them through obscure streets for the most part, and past no precious public buildings. The second stipulation was that the caskets must be carried in a hearse, and not upon the shoulders of men. The third was that no signs or banners should be borne. No word about “anarchistic ----”!
“Back to Normalcy,” said the Boston Herald; and put all this news on an inside page. The Post discussed such topics as “The Sunless Summer” and “Vegetarians and Shoes.” The chiefs of the moving picture industry, whose orgy with drunken prostitutes had filled the Boston newspapers while Sacco and Vanzetti were on trial, now held their meeting in New York and passed a resolution that the case was to be barred from the screen forever, and that all films of it should be destroyed. Said Betty, the ferocious: “The great American whore covers us with her skirts!”
Said Cornelia: “They must have found out what Bart thought of them! Do you remember, Betty, what he wrote in ‘Events and Victims’?” She looked up the manuscript, and found the passage in which Vanzetti had described the entertainment which American capitalism was supplying for its wage-slaves. “That ought to be published!” exclaimed Betty, and Joe made a copy of it; but alas, there was no paper in Boston which could be lured into printing such blasphemous words!
X
Sunday the day of the funeral. The crowds in Hanover Street made all movement difficult; they were so great that people were pushed through plate glass windows, and when these crashed there was a panic, because the crowd thought the police had started shooting. In the roped off area were two hearses and several limousines; oh, crowning insult--they were Packard cars! The supersalesman, now enjoying his hard-earned vacation, was making money as usual! In one car, with curtains drawn, rode the widow and children of Sacco and the sister of Vanzetti, both women in a state of collapse. It was an Italian funeral, with great floral wreaths borne by mourners, and the undertaker marching in a Prince Albert coat and top hat, in spite of a drizzling rain. State police--the “Cossacks”--rode ahead and alongside the hearses, to see that the procession followed the prescribed route. In the rear followed several open cars full of flowers, and several with mourners, among them Cornelia Thornwell.
The authorities had given the necessary permit, and had not limited the number of persons who might march in the procession; but they dared not let it be too big, for the sake of the moral effect. So the entire march was a series of battles between those who were determined to march, and the police who were trying to break them up and shunt them off into side streets, even if some had to be killed in the process. The members of the committee and friends of the defense had provided themselves with red arm-bands, reading: “Remember Justice Crucified. August 22, 1927,” and the wearers of these arm-bands were singled out for the fiercest attacks.
The procession moved down Hanover Street, and fifty thousand people fell in behind after it had passed. So when they came into Scollay Square, mounted policemen rode into the middle of the throng, and tried to form a line across the street, barring the bulk of the procession. The crowds dodged this way and that, to get by; the policemen began to wield their clubs, galloping their horses, and trampling men and women beneath the iron-shod hoofs. But a frenzy possessed the mourners; it was their last chance to express their loathing of the crime that had been committed, and of the criminals who had done it, and thousands were ready to die rather than be cut out from the parade. They broke through again and again, and screaming and cursing people were knocked down, or jammed through the windows of stores; the younger and more fleet-footed went racing around the block, so as to catch the procession farther on.
The hearses continued down Tremont Street, and came to Park Street, the corner of the Common, where the State House with the golden dome may be seen upon the hill. To march up Beacon Street and past that State House had been a fond dream of the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti. To keep them from realizing it, the police had not merely made a solid blockade of trucks across Park Street, but had a gang of laborers come and take up the paving blocks from sections of the street. The laborers stood watching the show, until the hearses and the crowd had passed; then they replaced the paving!
The procession moved along Tremont Street; on one side the Common, on the other the fashionable shops. A solid mass of people all the way, filling the sidewalks; the newspapers estimated that two hundred thousand saw the hearses go by. The marchers would have taken all day, if the police had let them alone. But at Charles Street they had another device; line after line of empty taxi-cabs drawn up, waiting for the hearses and the little group of mourners to pass; then the taxis broke out into the throng. It was against the law to break into a funeral, but there was no law in Boston except the will of the police. Who was paying the taxi-cabs for the service was not known. Their efforts were futile, for the people kept breaking through at risk of their lives.
No order was possible to the marchers; they just walked as they could; the crowds fell in behind, mostly with bared heads, in spite of the heavy rain that had begun to fall. Betty and Joe, Mary Donovan, Powers Hapgood, Alfred Baker Lewis--all the leaders were there. They were spreading flowers on the street--but that was against a city ordinance, said Mike Crowley, who rode with the procession, greatly astonished to see how many men and women were willing to get soaked for the sake of two anarchist wops.
Out through the South End; the friends of the defense now forming lines with linked arms for protection against the police. By the time they came to Roxbury Crossing, they had a military formation, and were able to keep the traffic from breaking them up, in spite of all efforts. The traffic police would signal for traffic to break into the procession, and cars would force their way a few feet amid cat-calls and screams; then they would give up, and Sacco and Vanzetti would have their way for the first time in Boston. One policeman forced a seven-ton truck into the crowd; the truck driver was attacked with umbrellas, and when the policeman tried to draw his club, he was swept aside.
It was in that part of Boston called Jamaica Plain that the orders came to break up the parade at all hazards. A small army of patrolmen charged into the crowd, wielding their clubs right and left. One patrolman made his attack in an automobile--darting this way and that, running people down, a new sport. Others climbed into the cars of the sympathizers, and clubbed the drivers, and drove the cars out of the line. Even the hard-boiled newspaper reporters were astonished by the sights they saw in that battle, and were permitted by their city editors to write a few plain sentences telling the incidents:
“One officer was to be seen beating a woman in the face with his fist. A girl was standing near the coal company office, her face buried in her hands with a split chin.... A policeman stuck his pistol at the window of a taxi-cab, then turned suddenly, went to another car, dragged a man out to kick him toward Boston. Persons who were riding on running boards of autos and taxi-cabs were dragged off and beaten or booted in the direction of Boston. By this time the main body was in flight toward Boston, pursued by a line of policemen who still used their clubs. Women were given no mercy in the panic.... While one man was being beaten by a sergeant with an umbrella, his hat was knocked off and, stooping to pick it up, he was booted by a patrolman. He went down and the patrolman kicked the hat high in the air.”
It was the process known as “Americanization.”
XI
Ten thousand persons were crowded about the Forest Hills cemetery, with hundreds of policemen to keep them from getting inside. The hearses were passed in, and the cars with the reporters and photographers, and a little group of mourners; the rest of those who had marched eight miles to attend the ceremony had to stand about outside--unless they were lively enough to climb the hedge and the iron picket fence. Inside the little chapel a hundred persons were gathered, and the two coffins were set upon a dais, covered with flowers, and Mary Donovan took her place beside them, white and trembling. For two years she had made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti her life; she had given up her religion, her friends, her job; and now it was her opportunity to speak the last words which the defense had to say to the rulers of Boston.
She lifted her voice; and then--a miracle, such as happens when martyrs are made in this world! It was discovered that the heart and brain of Vanzetti, supposed to be in the possession of the medicos of Harvard, so that they might probe into the secrets of how to be noble and how to be eloquent and how to be a master of English prose--that heart and brain had escaped from under their scalpels, and were here in the body of a frail Irish girl, a reformed Catholic, speaking words which would be woven into the texture of the new religion of humanity, and learned by school children under the new dispensation. Said Mary Donovan, addressing Boston’s martyrs:
“Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. You came to America seeking freedom. In the strong idealism of youth you came as workers searching for that liberty and equality of opportunity heralded as the particular gift of this country to all newcomers. You centered your labors in Massachusetts, the very birthplace of American ideals. And now Massachusetts and America have killed you--murdered you because you were anarchists.
“Two hundred and thirty-five years ago the ruling people of this State hanged women in Salem charging them with witchcraft. The shame of those old acts of barbarism can never be wiped out. But they are as nothing beside this murder which modern Massachusetts has committed upon you. The witch-hangers were motivated by the superstitious fear of an emotional religion. Their minds were blinded by their selfish passion to reach heaven.
“The minds of those who have killed you were not blinded. They have committed the act in deliberate cold blood. For more than seven years they had every chance to know the truth about you. Not once did they even dare mention the quality of your characters--a quality so noble and shining that millions have come to be guided by it. They refused to look. They allowed the bitter prejudice of class, position and self-interest to close their eyes. They cared more for wealth, comfort and institutions than they did for truth. You, Sacco and Vanzetti, are the victims of the crassest plutocracy the world has known since ancient Rome.
“Your long years of torture and your last hours of supreme agony are the living banner under which we and our descendants for generations to come will march to accomplish that better world based on the brotherhood for which you died.
“In your martyrdom we will fight on and conquer.
“Remember Justice Crucified. August 22. Remember.”
XII
Those who had strong nerves were privileged to go back into the crematory, and look through a glass plate into the “retorts,” and see the two bodies being resolved into their original elements--dust unto dust, ashes unto ashes. Those who could not stand the ordeal by fire, went out to face an ordeal by water; a downpour of rain such as Boston had rarely seen, almost a cloudburst. A more superstitious age would have said that the heavenly powers desired to wash the city clean, the blood from its streets and the blot from its name. One of those natural portents, like the rending of the veil in the temple, which accompany the making of martyrs!
Yes, Boston had rejected the advice of the shrewd old Frenchman, and made two martyrs. Mystic beings, with supernatural virtues, destined to become a legend; to expand like the genii released from the bottle, until they spread over the sky, completely overshadowing the city and its fame. No more would Boston be the place of the tea-party and the battle of Bunker Hill; Boston would be the place where Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death!
And those two, the shining ones, the holy, who died to make freedom for the workers! Already one saw the history of martyrology repeating itself: the process of two thousand years crowded into one. Already they were canonized beings, concerning whom it was forbidden to speak any word but of praise; already there were men who worshiped their ashes, and imprisoned those who followed their example!
And yet, obscurely, the symbol was working in the souls of men. A hundred million toilers knew that two comrades had died for them. Black men, brown men, yellow men--men of a hundred nations and a thousand tribes--the prisoners of starvation, the wretched of the earth--experienced a thrill of awe. It was the mystic process of blood-sacrifice, by which through the ages salvation has been brought to mankind!
A hundred million workers, shackled and blind, groping in a poison fog manufactured by their masters, learned that two of their fellows had been put to death for lifting the banner of freedom. In spite of all the wrangling of the radical sects, that was a fact the meaning of which could never be obscured; a fact which shone like a pillar of fire in the workers’ night. Bart had succeeded in the purpose he had declared, to give a meaning to his name. “It mean joostice, it mean freedom, it cannot mean nothing but!” To a hundred million groping, and ten times as many still in slumber, the names of Sacco and Vanzetti would be the eternal symbols of a dream, identical with civilization itself, of a human society in which wealth belongs to the producers of wealth, and the rewards of labor are to the laborers. In the words of the prophet Isaiah:
“And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.”
THE END
Note
On October 31, 1928, with the first edition of “Boston” printed, bound, and about to be published, there appears in the Outlook, an old established weekly magazine of New York, the true story of the Bridgewater crime, of which Vanzetti was convicted; a detailed confession by Frank Silva, one of the bandits who committed the crime, the confession checked in every detail, and published with the Outlook’s endorsement. The following statements in the story will be of interest to readers of this book.
First: The “shotgun bandit” was not Vanzetti, but a professional criminal by the name of “Doggy” Bruno, who wore a closely-cropped mustache.
Second: Frank Silva is the man whom Fred Moore was trailing. The lawyer visited Silva in Atlanta penitentiary, where he was serving a sentence for another crime, and endeavored unsuccessfully to persuade Silva to admit the truth about the Bridgewater crime.
Third: The crime was planned in the headquarters of Jimmie (“Big Chief”) Mede, a Boston crook, and the details of the affair were known to Mede. Fred Moore came to see Mede, then in Massachusetts State Prison, and offered him inducements to tell the truth. Mede refused, because he was trying to get a parole, and knew that this would interfere. The brother of John Vahey, Vanzetti’s lawyer at the Plymouth trial, came in haste to Mede, along with “Joseph Ross” (that Rossi who was interpreter at the Dedham trial, and was frequently Judge Thayer’s chauffeur) and warned Mede to tell nothing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
Fourth: When Sacco and Vanzetti were about to be executed, Mede was so troubled in his conscience that he went to Governor Fuller, and made a clean breast of the whole matter. Governor Fuller called in a state detective, who so frightened Mede that he dropped the matter and disappeared. Later, however, still worried because innocent men were about to be executed, Mede went with two Italian lawyers to Captain Blye of the state police, and endeavored to make a statement to him; but Blye refused to hear him, saying: “Well, it is embarrassing; I think it will be damned embarrassing.”
Fifth: In the efforts to check Silva’s confession, representatives of the Outlook were refused every sort of coöperation by the Massachusetts police authorities, and mysterious threatening messages were twice received by one of the Outlook representatives in Boston.
Transcriber’s Notes
‣ Italics represented by surrounding underscores.
‣ Small caps converted to ALL Caps.
‣ Obvious typographic errors silently corrected.
‣ Variations in hyphenation, spelling and application of diacritic marks kept as in the original.
‣ Correction:
p. 491: “I remember a years ago” to “I remember a few years ago”
The end
You’ve reached the end of Boston.
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