THE WEB OF FATE
I
Plymouth Court-house stands at the head of the square, a large and
stately building of red brick, with ivy climbing the walls, and white
colonial entrances, and a niche containing a figure of justice,
open-eyed. The court-room is bare and white, with a throne of polished
wood, and over it a great seal of the “Plymouth Society,” with the
flags of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts draped
on top. It is all extremely solemn and formal; the bailiff wears a
uniform, and carries a “wand,” or long stick with which he holds the
spectators in awe.
On the morning of the trial of Bartolomeo Vanzetti the room was filled
with spectators from Bridgewater, curious to behold the wicked bandit;
also a few working-people of foreign birth, Italians and Portuguese
of North Plymouth who remembered what Vanzetti had done for them in
the strike. The men had put on celluloid collars with gilt studs and
no ties, the women wore shawls and aprons; they sat, morning and
afternoon, following with strained attention a mysterious procedure in
a strange tongue. There were spectators from Boston, but no reporters
from there; the case excited only local interest, and was left to local
correspondents.
The prisoner was brought in, shackled to a deputy by each wrist; also
a steel cage was brought in, and he was locked inside. This in itself
was almost equivalent to a conviction--it made him look so alarming to
a jury, so much like a wild beast. The district attorney entered--a
stocky man of German parentage, florid, blond, good-looking, smartly
dressed. Fred Katzmann was his name, a Mason and a “joiner,” prominent
in the political ring which governed the county. Most political rings
in America are financed by the local corporations, and exist to carry
out their will; the efficiency of a public official usually consists
in the fact that he knows their needs and wishes so thoroughly that he
does what they want without having to be told.
In this case Fred Katzmann’s course was very easy--to consult his
prejudices. He knew that the Reds were pledged to destroy American
institutions, and therefore it was a patriotic service to destroy the
Reds. Later on he went before the alumni of his college, assembled for
banqueting, and the chairman introduced him as a hero who was going
to save the Commonwealth from its secret foes; the banqueters cheered
him tumultuously, and he made a speech accepting the stern duty.
All the district attorneys of the neighboring counties were making
such speeches at this time--it was an easy way to be popular, and to
conceal orgies of grafting and blackmailing--what was soon afterwards
to be described, in the charges against one of the most oratorical, as
“malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance in office.”
Fred Katzmann was personally an easy-going man, and cultivated a manner
of geniality which made a hit with juries. When the lawyers for the
defense came in, carrying briefcases and looking important, he greeted
them cordially; they were his friends, and during the procedures he
would refer to them as “my brothers.” He would carry on a merry battle
of wits with them, and the moment court was adjourned, he would walk
out side by side with them, and they would sit at lunch and “josh”
each other about the points they had lost or won. It was exactly like
a tennis tournament--except that in tennis they used a ball, while in
this legal game it was a wop.
II
A door in the front of the court-room opened, and there entered a thin,
shrunken old gentleman with a white mustache and a face like parchment.
He wore a black silk robe, and the moment he appeared the bailiff
pounded on the floor with his wand and shouted, “Court!” and all the
lawyers stood up, and the spectators stood up, and remained standing.
The bailiff drew a breath and shouted, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! All
persons having anything to do before the Honorable, the Justices of
the Superior Court, now sitting within and for the County of Plymouth,
draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard! God save the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” Whereupon the wrinkled old gentleman
sat down, and everybody else did the same.
Webster Thayer, judge of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, was what the pathologists call a “ticquer”; that is, he
blinked with a nervous affliction as he gazed about his domain. His
sharp, withered face was a symbol of the old Puritan spirit; his voice,
like a steel saw cutting through wood, was an ancestral inheritance,
produced by three hundred years of cold and foggy winds. He aspired to
exhibit repose, but his fear of so many foreigners in his court-room
showed itself by incessant nervous glances. He was obsessed with a
phobia on the subject of Reds, and talked about it incessantly, with so
much repetition that many persons avoided him, or ruthlessly shut him
up.
Cornelia had never heard of “Web” Thayer before, but he was to be the
subject of her study for seven years, and before long she knew him
completely. During this Plymouth trial he did not know who she was; but
during the second trial, that of Sacco and Vanzetti a year later, he
had heard about her, and he summoned her three times to his chambers
to impress his personality upon her and to justify his ways. So she
learned that the basis of his being was an inferiority complex, a
sense of the gulf which yawned between him and the great ones of his
community, and which he would never cross, even though he won his way
to the Supreme Judicial bench. He was a Thayer, but not of the “right”
ones; and in Massachusetts it is a special offense to bear an honored
name unless you are one of the “right” ones. There are the “right”
Cabots--and assuredly they are not those who used to be called Caboto
and Kabotinsky, and got permission from a too complaisant court to
Americanize themselves. There are “right” Coolidges, and Calvin is not
among them, and would not be, though he were president of the United
States for half a dozen terms.
“Web” lived in Worcester, which is a city in the wilds of the far
west--that is to say, forty miles removed from the cultural influences
of the Back Bay. It is a hardware center, the home of hardware men,
who hustle and “boost” and make “selling talks.” “Web” had gone
to Dartmouth, a small college in the hills of New Hampshire, whose
graduates are looked down upon by the haughty scions of the Harvard
“Gold Coast.” “Web” asserted his uneasy personality, and drew attention
to himself, something the “blue-bloods” never do, because they do
not have to. In this Sacco-Vanzetti affair “Web” would do what the
Commonwealth wanted him to do, but he would do it in such a way that
the Back Bay would blush for him, and comfort itself by calling it one
more sign of the degradation of politics, a consequence of turning over
public affairs to the “mob.”
He was a man of intense vanity, and played the judicial game as a drama
in which he was hero and king. But he could never be sure whether he
was successful in the rôle, and the actor would stop in the middle
of the play to ask the audience. To the lawyers, or any one else who
came to his chambers after the sessions, he would say, “Am I handling
this all right?” To the newspaper reporters he would say, “Now, boys,
give me a good deal on this.” If the reporter happened to be a young
and pretty woman, as it did in at least one case, he would employ the
arts of gallantry, which are somehow less welcome from an old man with
a skin like a mummy’s. He would take a seat beside her on the train
going to the trial, and smile and ogle, and present a flower to her,
and discuss the case. His voice had a penetrating quality, and when the
train stopped, every one in the car would hear what he was saying. He
must have known the mental discomfort he was causing to his auditor,
yet something drove him to go on.
There is an ancient tradition among those who deal with the law that
a judge must not discuss a case in public, at least not while it is
actually before him. But in handling Sacco and Vanzetti, “Web” Thayer
could not keep within these traditional limits. He would talk about the
case in a club dining-room, until all the men would leave the table; he
would approach a Dartmouth professor on the football field, asking in a
loud voice, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards the
other day?” The horror of these words became such in Massachusetts that
the Commonwealth had to send its policemen with hickory clubs to crack
the skulls of demonstrants who carried the words on a banner. Because
there was no way to keep them from being spoken aloud, Boston Common
had to be closed to public speakers for the first time in its three
hundred years of history.
III
One by one the talesmen took the stand, and were questioned; under the
Massachusetts practice, all this questioning was done by the judge, and
the defendants’ lawyers could only exercise the right of challenge. One
by one the jurors were selected: Arthur W. Burgess, shoemaker of the
town of Hanson, Henry S. Burgess, caretaker of the town of Wareham,
Joseph Frawley, shoe-finisher of the town of Brockton, Charles A. Gale,
clerk, of the town of Norwell--so it went, all Anglo-Saxon names.
Put none but Americans on guard! Edwin P. Litchfield, shoe-worker of
Pembroke, Oliver B. Poole, clerk of Brockton, Alfred M. Shaw, Jr.,
laborer of Carver, Charles C. Wilbur, tackmaker of Kingston: such
little people of the old stock, having failed for one reason or another
to become rich, looked with bitter contempt upon the immigrants who
came pouring into the country, to beat down wages and make life harder
for the “white men” of New England. Far from having any sense of class
solidarity, they clung to the American idea that their children would
rise and join the leisure class; their attitude to the Italian was that
of the poor whites of the south to the Negroes. “All these wops stand
together,” said one juryman to another, discussing the case at lunch in
a restaurant. The remark was overheard, but nothing came of it.
Another juror, Arthur S. Nickerson, a foreman in the Plymouth Cordage
Company! Another foreman of that same company had thrown Vanzetti, the
agitator, out of their plant, and kept him out four years and more;
others had refused him employment, and some one had caused him to
be shadowed by detectives for eighteen months after the strike. Now
Nickerson was to help decide whether or not Vanzetti should be set at
liberty to lead another strike, and deprive the cordage company of
another two hundred thousand dollars a year in extra wages! Vanzetti’s
friends saw with dismay his lawyers permit such a juror to be accepted.
They asked themselves, could it be because one of the lawyers was
a stockholder in the company, and looking to the company for legal
business as well as for dividends? It was permissible to ask.
The assistant district attorney rose, and addressed the jury, telling
them what he was going to prove. He told them all that elaborate
“theory” about the Coacci house and the bandit-car, which had been
stolen a month before the Bridgewater crime, and found in Manley woods
abandoned after the South Braintree crime. He brought this car, a
Buick, in front of the court-house, and he told them about Boda, and
how he was going to prove that Boda had been driving a Buick car a
short while before the crime. He told them about Orciani--despite the
fact that they had had to drop Orciani on account of an American alibi.
He told them about Sacco, despite the fact that they had had to drop
Sacco from this case on account of another American alibi. He built up
in the jury’s mind an elaborate picture of bandit-gangs, bandit-houses
and bandit-cars--and then in the course of the trial he failed to
produce a particle of evidence to connect either Sacco, Coacci, Orciani
or Boda with any crime, or to connect Coacci’s house with any crime,
or to connect any one of the five men with the so-called bandit-car.
One scrap of testimony--a milkman had seen Boda driving a Buick car a
month or two before the crime; or at least he thought it was Boda and
he thought it was a Buick. Yet they brought in all this complicated and
alarming mass of “theory,” not merely at this Plymouth trial, but at
the later trial of Sacco and Vanzetti for the South Braintree crime;
they showed the bandit-car in both cases, and the bullet-hole in it,
and planted the mass of suspicion in the minds of both juries.
IV
Benjamin F. Bowles to the stand: a special officer employed by the
shoe-company, and at the same time a member of Mike Stewart’s police
force in Bridgewater. He had been riding in the seat alongside the
driver of the truck, when two bandits, one with a shotgun, the other
with a revolver, had rushed out and opened fire. The chauffeur of
the paytruck had fainted from fright, and Bowles had seized the
steering-wheel and guided the truck with his left hand, while with
his right he fired a revolver at the shotgun bandit, until the bandit
turned and ran. Later in the trial Bowles took the stand again and
changed his testimony, so as to make it fit with the story he had told
at the preliminary hearing: he now swore that he had fired, not at the
shotgun-bandit, but at the other one, the revolver-bandit. So here was
the picture this super-policeman presented to the jury: he had steered
a fast-moving truck with his left hand, fired a revolver at a bandit
with his right hand, and at the same time used his eyes to study the
appearance of a second bandit, so effectively that he could give a
detailed description fitting the features, hair, eyes and clothing of
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, now sitting in the prisoner’s dock before him!
At the preliminary hearing Bowles had been “pretty positive” that the
shotgun bandit had had a “short and croppy” mustache; but now at the
trial he was “positive” that this bandit had had a “bushy” mustache.
Next came a shoe-inspector, Frank Harding, known as “Skip,” who had
witnessed the crime. He had talked to a reporter of the Boston _Globe_,
an hour or two afterwards, and described the bandit as “smooth-shaven.”
At the preliminary hearing he had described him as having “an
overgrown Charlie Chaplin mustache.” Now at the trial he identified
him as Vanzetti. He had positively identified Orciani as the other
bandit; but that fact was not evidence at the trial. Neither was the
_Globe_ reporter’s testimony, for that was not discovered until years
later--when it might as well not have been discovered at all. To the
Pinkerton detectives “Skip” had described the bandit-car as a Hudson;
and he had been an automobile mechanic and knew cars. But now he swore
it was a Buick--which happened to be what the “theory” required.
Then came the paymaster, Cox, who had described the shotgun bandit at
the preliminary hearing as “short and of slight build.” Now he made it
agree with Bowles--“five feet eight.” But no effort of the district
attorney could get him to say that he was sure Vanzetti was the man.
Then came the elderly Georgina Brooks, and with her the age of miracles
came back. Mrs. Brooks testified that she had looked out of the window
of the Bridgewater railroad depot--she specified which window--and had
seen “fire and smoke from a gun.” It so happened that between that
window and the spot where the firing had occurred, there intervened the
full bulk of two two-story houses. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense employed
a surveyor to make a map of the scene--but like everything else, it
was too late.
Also Mrs. Brooks testified that on her way to the depot, and before the
crime, she had inspected the bandit-car and the bandits. She identified
Vanzetti as a man she had looked at twice, and who had looked at her
“severely.” Why she should have turned to look at the car a second
time, and been so particular about examining the features of a man
sitting casually in an automobile was something Mrs. Brooks could not
explain. But she admitted that with one eye she could barely make out
the silhouette of objects, and that she had been undergoing treatment
for the other eye.
Then young Shaw, a schoolboy who had heard the firing and dodged behind
a tree. He had seen the shotgun-bandit run away, at a distance of a
hundred and forty-five feet, and said that he could tell the man was a
foreigner by the way he ran. “What sort of a foreigner?” and the boy
replied, “Either Italian or Russian.”
“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a
Norwegian?”
“Yes.”
“What is the difference?”
“Unsteady.”
Then came Mike Stewart, large, powerful, heavy-lidded. He brought with
him his theory--but you may be sure he never mentioned the “detective
machine,” from which the theory had been born! Neither did he mention
the Pinkerton reports, and how they confuted the testimony of “Skip”
Harding. “Skip” had taken down the number of the bandit-car, and
given a memorandum to Mike, who had unfortunately lost it. Also,
unfortunately, there was no number-plate on the car which the police
had found in the Manley woods.
They introduced Vanzetti’s cap, and a man swore it resembled the cap
worn by the shotgun-bandit--although Cox and Mrs. Brooks had sworn
to a shotgun-bandit in a soft hat. And that was practically all they
had to offer, except for an empty twelve-gauge shotgun shell which
they claimed to have picked up at the scene of the shooting. When
Vanzetti had been arrested, he had had four shotgun shells in his
pocket, and these were put into evidence, but the jury never heard
Vanzetti’s story of how he came to have them. He had spent the day
of his arrest at Sacco’s, while the family was packing up for Italy,
and these shells, left over from hunting, were picked up on a shelf;
Vanzetti had put them into his pocket, saying that he would turn them
over to some comrade and get fifty cents for the cause. But that story
must not be told to the jury, because Vanzetti would be asked what he
mean by the “cause,” and he would have to answer that it was the evil
cause of anarchism. Nor would it do to put Sacco on the stand, or his
wife, because that would bring in the other crime, and the lawyers
were maintaining their legal fiction that the jury knew nothing about
it--although, of course, every one of them had read about it on the
front page of all the papers, and the assistant district attorney had
brought Sacco in as a part of the “theory”!
V
Such was the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against
Bartolomeo Vanzetti. And now it was the defendant’s turn to produce his
alibi, and persuade a Yankee jury to believe it. Cornelia and Betty and
Joe, watching these proceedings day by day with strained and fearful
attention, realized too late how difficult it was going to be. There
sat those native sons of New England, lean-faced and stern--elderly
men, most of them, because the younger and more active found means to
avoid jury duty. Men with such names as Burgess and Gale and Litchfield
and Nickerson and Shaw were invited to believe the testimony of
Vittorio Papa and Carlo Balboni and Vincenzo Brini and Enrico Bastoni
and Teresa Malaguti and Adalaida Bongiovanni and Marguaritta Fiocchi:
men with black hair and eyebrows, broad faces and high cheek-bones,
uncouth and sinister, clad in ill-fitting cheap store-clothes; women
short and stout, with broad mouths and low foreheads, with no collars
to their shirt-waists, wearing aprons in front of them and dingy shawls
about their shoulders, speaking a foreign jabber which was turned into
English by an interpreter who looked as much like a bandit as the
others. These were the “Dagoes” who were taking bread out of the mouths
of the old stock, swarming into the factory towns, carrying fire-arms,
living like pigs, and raising litters of as many little pigs as any
farmer ever saw. “These wops all stand together,” said one juryman;
and all native New England agreed.
Mrs. Mary Fortini, Bart’s landlady, told how she had waked him up at
six o’clock that morning before Christmas, and how he had gulped down
his bread and coffee, and hurried to get out his cart and his eels.
Carlo Balboni told how he had come home from his night work, and caused
Mrs. Fortini to wake Bart, so that he, Balboni, might be the first
customer. John Di Carlo, who kept a shoe-store, testified how Bart had
brought him eels while he was cleaning out the store, a little after
seven. Each of these witnesses was harrowed by the prosecution, who
sought by every legal trick to trip them up in their testimony.
The issue of “radicalism” was not supposed to be brought into the
trial; the jury was not supposed to know about it, and in the years
that were to follow you would hear judges and editors and governors and
college presidents and other eminent persons stoutly maintaining that
this issue had not entered the case until the defense had brought it in
at the second trial. But behold, here was the suave district attorney,
questioning the shoe-store proprietor: “Have you ever discussed
government theories over there between you? Have you discussed the
question of the poor man and the rich man between you?” And later comes
Michael Sassi, a gardener, to the stand, and the prosecutor asks, “Have
you heard anything of his political beliefs? Have you heard him make
any speeches to your friends in the cordage company?” This questioning
led by accident to some character testimony--in spite of the effort to
bar such testimony. Said the district attorney, “You have dined many
times with Vanzetti, haven’t you?”
“With Brini, as his guest, I dined many times: Vanzetti boarded with
him and sometimes he was present.”
“You used to play cards with the defendant?”
“Vanzetti does not play.”
“To smoke, didn’t you?”
“I do not smoke.”
“How many times have you drank with him?”
“Vanzetti does not drink.”
Said Bart, commenting on this evidence: “What a method to find out
whether I had been robbing in Bridgewater or delivering fish in
Plymouth on the 24th of December, 1919!” Poor Bart, who had to sit
in complete silence, watching all this from inside a cage, sternly
rebuked on the one occasion when he dared to interrupt! He had to see
the rascalities of the prosecution, and the unconvincing quality of
the defense--he who, from first to last, understood the case better
than any other person interested in it, even the most famous and most
expensive of lawyers! He who could read every motive, understand every
character, predict every event, and advise, generally in vain, what
should be done--he had to sit and watch everything done wrong, and ruin
come down upon him like a slow-grinding glacier.
VI
One by one came Italian witnesses, telling the story of Vanzetti’s
movements through every hour of that fateful day. Vincenzo Brini had
come home from night-work, and got some eels, and chatted with his
friend and former boarder. Bastoni, the baker, had refused to rent
the horse and wagon; the time was exactly seven-forty-five, because
the cordage whistle blew as Bart entered the store, and “that whistle
is our bread and butter.” And then Beltrando Brini, twelve years and
a half old, bright-eyed and eager, speaking very good English, and
thoroughly alert to the meaning of this scene. Trando had first been
with Bart about seven-thirty, and had been sent home to hunt out his
rubbers from the attic. He had rejoined Bart just as the latter left
the baker’s, and told about his disappointment over the horse and
wagon, and how he had talked about it every day thereafter. He told
how he and Bart had gone from house to house, up one street and down
another, delivering their eels, until two-forty that afternoon. He
named the streets and the people, described the houses and told of
conversations, every detail that lived in his mind.
And Mr. Katzmann took him and spent two hours trying to trap him;
making him tell parts of his story over and over, hoping that it would
vary; pretending that Trando had said things he hadn’t said; trying to
mix him up about the number of hours he had been with Bart--because
Trando took out the time he was hunting rubbers and the time he went
to lunch, and Mr. Katzmann pretended not to understand this. He asked
what did the basket of eels weigh, and could Trando carry it the long
route he had described. Trando replied that any one could see, the
basket got lighter as he delivered. In the end Katzmann had to give
up, and pay Trando the high compliment of calling him such another as
Katzmann himself. Turning to the jury he said: “The parents of such an
intelligent boy are right to be proud of him, but what he told you from
the stand is a lesson learned by heart.”
There came a string of Italian housewives, telling how Vanzetti had
sold them eels; eight or ten testified, and there were twice as many
more, but the lawyers said it would be a mistake, “the jury will be
bored with so much eel-talk.” If they refused to believe a score of
Italian witnesses, would they believe two score or three score? The
lawyers insisted that the alibi had been proved. But Bart was not
satisfied, he was angry because of the efforts of the prosecution to
claim that he had had a “cropped mustache.” He pointed to his soft and
silky hairs, which could not be got to stand out; there were so few of
them, that was why he had always worn his mustaches long; if he had
cut them short, there would have been nothing. For eight years he had
been going about this town of Plymouth with his walrus mustaches, and
everybody knew him; but this jury contained only one Plymouth man, and
did not know him. Bart insisted that the truth about his mustache must
be proved, and in a passion of indignation he told his lawyers that if
they did not do it, he would rise up in court and denounce them for
treason to their client.
So at the last moment the Italian “runner” went scurrying to find
some of Vanzetti’s friends who knew that his mustaches had never
been trimmed. Also Cornelia and Betty and Joe and the Brinis went
hunting--and strange was that experience, painful that discovery about
human nature, in this terror-ridden town of Cordage. Policemen who knew
Vanzetti, and had seen him on the street many times a week for eight
years, were afraid for their jobs if they testified as to the length
of his mustaches! Contractors who had hired him were afraid for their
future contracts! Italian barbers were afraid for their little shops,
and their little bootlegging on the side!
In the end they found two policemen who gave nervous and halting
testimony that Vanzetti had always worn his walrus mustaches. They
found an Italian cement contractor, Christofore, who had employed
Vanzetti, and found him a good workman, and had always known him with
his mustaches. The prosecuting attorney browbeat this witness, who
knew no English, asking him about the mustaches of this person and
that--among them of Beltrando Brini, aged twelve and a half years! He
asked about the proprietor of one of Plymouth’s big hotels--what kind
of a mustache did this gentleman have, and Christofore described it, a
small mustache that he was growing. After the noon recess the gentleman
was put upon the stand, and exhibited to the jury a completely
smooth-shaven face! What was the use of all this mustache-talk, said
the district attorney, when they put a mustache on a man who had never
had one?
The only time in her life that Cornelia ever heard Vanzetti swear
was when he talked about this dirty trick which had been played upon
him. For trick it was--whether the hotel proprietor had got shaved
especially for his appearance as a witness, or whether it had just
happened, that he had got shaved since the Italians had last met him.
This much was certain: Christofore had seen this hotel proprietor with
a mustache, and so had Vanzetti and many of his friends. The jury
could not know, because, with one exception, they were outsiders. But
Katzmann and Judge Thayer had sometimes been known to stay at this
man’s hotel, and to sit in front of his fire-place in the evening,
gossiping with him about what had happened during the day.
VII
Such was the closing scene of this duel of evidence. The jury listened
to the genial Mr. Katzmann become suddenly stern and patriotic. “Dagoes
stand together!” he exclaimed--and it was easy for them to draw the
conclusion that Americans should profit by their example. Then came
Judge Thayer, thin-faced, tight-lipped, sharp-voiced, such a great man
as these little men of the jury had been taught to reverence. Nothing
of the inferiority complex now, nothing of the restless uneasiness, the
vulgar craving for attention. It was the great actor now, playing the
part which had been his life-study. He knew exactly what instructions
to give to these Yankee jurymen, to appeal to their prejudices without
seeming to do so. When students of the case sought to ascertain what
he had said, it was discovered that the court stenographer’s notes had
been burned, and that the copy furnished the defense was strangely
lacking in part of the judge’s charge.
The jury retired to deliberate, and carried with them the four shotgun
shells which were alleged to have been found upon Vanzetti. They had
been identified as ordinary hunting shells, containing bird-shot, which
would not be apt to kill a man. But the jurors decided to investigate
further, so they opened them, and behold, they were filled with
buckshot, which would surely kill a man!
Now there is no point upon which English and American law is more
strict than this, that all evidence in a criminal trial must be
produced in the presence of the defendant. Vanzetti was entitled to
know about those buckshot, and to explain the fact if he could. Maybe
he would have taken the stand, maybe Sacco would have done so; maybe
they might have wished to ask, who had had the keeping of those shells
for the past six months, and what were the chances of their having
got mixed up with other shells. There were no identifying marks upon
them--but Vanzetti never had a chance to point this out. The jury went
ahead and brought in a verdict; and next day one of the jurors happened
to meet Judge Thayer in a restaurant, and showed him several of the
buckshot. Judge Thayer knew at once that if this story leaked out, the
whole expensive trial would go for nothing. He hurried to Katzmann,
who came and got the buckshot from the juror before he left the place.
Then Katzmann phoned the other jurors to come to his office, and warned
them, and the matter was hushed up.
It was half a year later that the facts got out, and then several of
the jurors made affidavits about it. An effort was made to invalidate
the trial on this ground, but the matter was never argued. If it had
been, it would have been argued before Judge Thayer! Whenever during
the next seven years the defense discovered new evidence, they would
make a motion for a new trial, and under the laws of the august
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a decision would be handed down by
Judge Thayer! When the defense set up a claim that the judge in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case had shown prejudice, they made a motion, and it
was referred to Judge Thayer, who solemnly listened to arguments,
and solemnly handed down a decision to the effect that he had no
jurisdiction! Incidentally he solemnly stated that he had no prejudice;
and this after he had been going about among his clubmates for several
years, saying, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?”
The indictment charged “attempting to rob” and “attempting to kill.”
The judge in his instructions had directed that the second charge
should be ignored, because the evidence showed that the bandits had
merely sought to intimidate the guards; they could hardly have missed
their targets with a shotgun at such close range. But after the jurors
had opened the shells and found the buckshot, they decided to ignore
the judge’s instructions, and brought in a verdict of guilty on both
counts. The judge, in an effort to correct this error, took the liberty
of ignoring one-half the jury’s verdict and sentencing the prisoner to
the maximum penalty of fifteen years in state’s prison for attempting
to rob.
The scene in the court-room when the verdict was brought in was a
heart-rending one. For ten days the friends of Vanzetti had sat in
a tension of anxiety, and now their grief was not to be restrained.
Cornelia bowed her head in her arms and wept, while Betty sat,
white-faced and quivering, clutching Joe’s hand. The Italian women
became hysterical; they screamed and wailed, and the contagion spread
from one to another--it was a scene of utter desperation, never
anything to equal it. Vanzetti had to stand up and cry to them,
“Coraggio! Coraggio!” His guards permitted that much before they
shackled his wrists to their own, and led him swiftly out by a side
door, and put him into a car and whisked him away to the jail.
Next day when Cornelia and Betty went to see him, for the first time
they met an utterly broken man. Again and again he said the words
with which he had first greeted them, “My enemy have got me!” He told
them what the rest would be--he, the clear-sighted one, the thinker,
the analyst of class forces. “I am a convicted. Nick is the friend
of a convicted, he is a bandit already, he is a dead man. The jury
will say, ‘One of them is bad, why should other be better?’” And when
Cornelia pledged her word that she would move heaven and earth to have
this verdict set aside, he told her, “You will try, Nonna, but never
will be succeeded. It is not for bandit I am convicted, it is for
anarchista. If men do sooch trick like you see in court, what is use
for hoping?”
Then it was that he swore, because of that mustache trick which had
been played by the hotel proprietor. At that time he did not know
about the buckshot. He did not know about the Pinkerton reports, which
had been kept hidden by the prosecution. He did not know about the
witnesses who had been rejected by the police because they did not
describe the bandits according to the “theory.” But he did know about
the great cordage company, and the losses he had caused it in the
strike; so, when Cornelia talked about decent people who would not
stand for that “mustache trick,” he laughed a bitter laugh. “You will
see, Nonna. They will say, it is for jury to decide. They will say,
musta trust jury, musta stand by court.”
VIII
They put Vanzetti in an automobile, and with another car full of armed
men in front and a third one bringing up the rear, they drove him to
Boston and shut him behind the stone walls of the dingy old Charlestown
prison--built in 1805, when the population of Massachusetts was
one-tenth what it is now. It stands directly across the river from the
city, so placed that on certain mornings when the sun rises clear, the
shadow of Bunker Hill monument strikes its walls. An odd turn of fate,
that this Italian seeker of liberty should have been convicted within
sight of Plymouth Rock, and killed on ground over which Paul Revere had
ridden.
They weighed him and measured him and scientifically scrutinized him,
and dressed him in faded khaki, and put him in a cell containing an
iron cot, and a free space eight feet long and one foot, ten inches
wide, with light falling from a narrow slit in the ceiling. In that
cell he would stay, fifteen and a half hours out of twenty-four, for
the next seven years--except for the holidays of another indictment,
trial and sentence. Of the remaining hours a day he would spend seven
working in a tailor-shop, and forty minutes in a yard, overcrowded,
smoky and dusty.
Soon after the beginning of this régime the Catholic chaplain of the
prison came to see him. It is a Catholic maxim--therefore a prison
maxim--that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”; and even an alleged
atheist is a human being, and may respond to kindness and sympathy. The
good Father Murphy talked to him, not about religion, but about general
matters; and then, having got on friendly terms, remarked, quite
casually, “Tell me, Vanzetti, who drove the car at South Braintree?”
Thereupon the alleged atheist rose up with dignity, and asked for
the privilege of being alone in his cell, and the consolations of
organized, institutionalized and subsidized religion were missing from
the remainder of his life.
Instead he sought the consolations of literature. He wrote a long
letter, pouring out his soul--and incidentally revealing that he was
coming to feel at home in a new language; he no longer had to look up
every word.
“I was just thinking what I would to do for past the long days
jail: I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A
gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why
don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you when you
will be free. Just at that time I received your letter.
“Thanks to you from the bottom of my heart for your confidence
in my innocence; I am so. I did not spittel a drop of blood, or
steal a cent in all my life. A little knowledge of the past;
a sorrowful experience of the life itself had gave to me some
ideas very different from those of many other uman beings. But I
wish to convince my fellow-men that only with virtue and honesty
is possible for us to find a little happiness in the world. I
preached: I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social
wealth would belong to every umane creatures, so well as it was
the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for a
insurrection.
“The insurrection, the great movements of the soul do not need
dollars. It need love, light, spirit of sacrifice, ideas,
conscience, instincts. It need more conscience, more hope and more
goodness. And all this blassing things can be seeded, awoked,
growed up in the heart of man in many ways, but not by robbery and
murder for robbery.
“I like you to know that I think to Italy, so speaking. From the
universal family, turning to this humble son, I will say that,
as far as my needs, wish and aspirations call, I do not need to
become a bandit. I like the teaching of Tolstoi, Saint Francesco
and Dante. I like the example of Cincinnati and Garibaldi. The
epicurean joi do not like to me. A little roof, a field, a few
books and food is all what I need. I do not care for money, for
leisure, for mondane ambition. And honest, even in this world of
lambs and wolves I can have those things. But my father has many
field, houses, garden. He deal in wine and fruits and granaries. He
wrote to me many times to come back home, and be a business man.
Well, this supposed murderer had answered to him that my conscience
do not permit to me to be a business man and I will gain my bread
by work his field.
“And more: The clearness of mind, the peace of the conscience,
the determination and force of will, the intelligence, all, all
what make the man feeling to be a part of the life, force and
intelligence of the universe, will be brake by a crime. I know
that, I see that, I tell that to everybody. Do not violate the law
of nature, if you do not want to be a miserable. I remember: it was
a night without moon, but starry. I sit alone in the darkness, I
was sorry, very sorry. With the face in my hands I began to look at
the stars. I feel that my soul want goes away from my body, and I
have had to make an effort to keep it in my chest. So, I am the son
of Nature, and I am so rich that I do not need any money. And for
this they say I am a murderer and will condemn me to death. Death?
It is nothing. Abbominium is cruel thing.
“Now you advise me to study. Yes, it would be a good thing.
But I do not know enough this language to be able to make any
study through it. I will like to read Longfellow’s, Paine’s,
Franklin’s and Jefferson’s works, but I cannot. I would like to
study mathematics, physics, history and science, but I have not
a sufficient elementary school to begin such studies, especially
the two first and I cannot study without work, hard physical work,
sunshine and winds; free, blassing wind. There is no flame without
the atmospheric gasses; and no light of genius in any soul without
they communion with Mother Nature.
“I hope to see you very soon; I will tell you more in the matter.
I will write something, a meditation perhaps and name it: Waiting
for the Hanger. I have lost the confidence in the justice of man.
I mean in what is called so; not of course, of that sentiment which
lay in the heart of man, and that no infernal force will be strong
enough to soffocate it. Your assistance and the assistance of so
many good men and women, had made my cross much more light. I will
not forget it.
“I beg your pardon for such a long letter, but I feel so
reminiscent to you that hundred pages would not be sufficient to
extern my sentiments and feelings. I am sure you will excuse me.
Salve.
“Give to all my best regards and wishes, Your
“BARTHOLOMEW VANZETTI.”
IX
Cornelia and Betty and Joe were back in Boston, the first two having
been hurriedly summoned for the funeral of Great-aunt Priscilla. It
is highly inconvenient, belonging to one of these big families; there
are so many funerals, weddings and christenings, which it would be
unthinkable not to attend.
An extraordinary thing had happened to this aged female Brahmin in the
closing months of her life; the bacillus of eccentricity, which lurks
in all Boston blue blood, had suddenly flared into activity. Priscilla
Quincy Adams Thornwell, spinster, aged eighty-seven, stiff as a ramrod
and model of every known or conceivable kind of propriety, had suddenly
fallen under the spell of an Episcopal faith-healer, who was traveling
about the country insisting that every bishop, even every country
parson, could demonstrate the living presence of God, work miracles,
and stop the slow dribble of Episcopalians into Christian Science.
Great-aunt Priscilla almost succeeded in arising and taking up her
bed and walking, in spite of the complete anchylosis of her spine;
she insisted that she would have done it, had it not been that her
relatives persisted in reminding her of her great age--a “negative
suggestion.” She took up the habit of being what she called “instant in
prayer,” which meant that she was liable to start talking to God at any
moment. It was embarrassing to her relatives and friends, because of
course no one likes to interrupt a talk with God, and feels something
of an interloper even to sit and listen to it. Great-aunt Priscilla
summoned her brother, Abner, over whom she had great authority,
because he was only eighty-five years old, and tried to persuade him
to appeal for a cure of his deafness. But Abner argued that if God had
meant him not to be deaf, God wouldn’t have made him deaf; and this was
a relief to the family, because it frightened them to imagine Abner
becoming “instant in prayer,” with that deaf man’s voice which filled
the biggest house in Boston.
And now it was discovered that Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell,
spinster, had left a letter asserting that the Episcopal service
for the burial of the dead was a denial of the faith of Jesus, and
specifying that she was to be buried from Trinity Church with the
services for Easter Morning! It was a problem for authorities in
ecclesiastical etiquette; but to defy a Thornwell was unthinkable,
so the rector and his assistants finally decided that One to whom
a thousand years were as a day might conceivably accept any day as
Easter. There were no lilies on the market, but there were plenty
of roses, and the occasion created almost as much excitement as a
vaudeville show that was likely to be raided by the police. It was as
if everybody were secretly wondering whether the Lord might give some
sign of his displeasure at this setting back of the church calendar for
three months. But apparently the Lord understood Boston, a city which
is governed by the old, and especially the old ladies.
They were all at this service, even though they had to motor a hundred
miles from the country. They wore their black dresses and bonnets, some
new and shiny, some old and rusty--but never forget that the rustiest
might be the richest. To wear a dowdy dress and a mangy fur tippet
might mean one who was able to scorn ostentation--just as illiteracy
in an English duke means that he is above the laws of grammar. One
of these old ladies might dispose of millions upon a whim, and her
lightest word was social law. They sat in family pews which had
belonged to them since the great brown-stone church was built; beside
them the younger generations--sweet-faced ladies, better dressed, and
oh, so neat and clean, gazing with rapt faces at a fairy-story setting
of white roses and candles and stained-glass-window saints, and a
procession of toddlers in white robes, singing in cherubs’ voices
to the rolling music of four organs in four different corners. How
beautiful it all was, and how serene--and how amazing to come to it
out of that world of lies and cruelty which Cornelia and Betty had just
left!
Look about you at these perfect Anglo-Saxon faces--not a foreign one
among them--so elegant and so satisfied! Note the costumes, polished to
the last pin, and chosen with impeccable taste--broadcloth and patent
leather and spats for the men, veils and laces, silk stockings and
delicate scents, flowers and unostentatious jewelry for the ladies!
Note the soft, cultivated voices, the gracious manners, rehearsed
for centuries! Note the ancient formulas, the ritual established
since eternity; the prayers and anthems rising to an Anglo-Saxon God,
untainted by His temporary sojourn in a Hebrew womb. Bland saints in
all the windows, with golden haloes and bright-colored robes, untainted
by contact with the fishing industry. A rector who was the last word
in Back Bay fashion, the Harvard manner grafted upon a mediæval
ecclesiastic.
While the sweet-faced ladies gazed up at him adoringly, he pronounced
a little eulogy upon the virtues of the dear departed, whose faith
and funds had nourished the church for two generations and a half. It
wasn’t customary to make speeches at church funerals; but since this
was an Easter Sunday service, a different rule might well apply. The
rector referred to the recent new fervors of the deceased, a matter
which required tact, because this rector had got his training in days
when the theological department of the university was separate from
the medical. He made an excursion into the field of modern thought,
revealing that he had heard of the science of astronomy and knew that
the earth was small; more amazing yet, he gave up the Virgin birth,
saying that we did not know just what had happened on that occasion,
and perhaps would never know. It sounded like a hint at some scandal in
the Holy Family, and would have made a scandal in Episcopal circles in
other cities: but not in Boston, where everything is far advanced, and
Trinity Church has to compete with King’s Chapel, which is Unitarian,
and even more intellectual, and if possible more fashionable.
X
The funeral had the effect of bringing Cornelia and Betty back into
the family, and they heard the latest gossip. Alice Winters was
still supporting her “little theater,” but very unhappy, because her
poet, supposed to be storming Parnassus, was getting drunk every
night, and neglecting his muse for a brazen, yellow-headed flapper.
Clara Scatterbridge was getting stout, and the best reducing experts
could not solve her problem; she concealed the dire truth from these
advisers, but not from the Argus eyes of the family--that she kept an
assortment of sweets in her boudoir, and nibbled chocolates and candied
fruits all day.
Great-uncle Abner was very melancholy now; he was the last of the old
generation, he said, and his time would come soon--which was certainly
a negative suggestion! He could no longer remember the chess moves he
had made last week, and his son Quincy was losing games on purpose, in
order to keep up the old man’s spirits. Abner had gone to stay with
the Scatterbridges, because he liked to be with the children; each of
the younger ones had a donkey to ride, and Abner had one too, and rode
at the head of the procession, all over the estate--a most laughable
sight. But everybody had to keep a sober face, because if you laughed
at anything whatever, the old man would think you were laughing at him,
and would take ineradicable offense.
Deborah came to the little apartment to have lunch with her mother and
daughter; and presently it transpired that the Argus eyes of the family
had observed Betty going about town with a young man by the name of
Joseph Jefferson Randall. Who was he? A grandson of the actor? Betty
said no, he was one of the Randalls of Pakenham Court House, Virginia,
and a nephew of Senator Randall, now ambassador to one of the South
American countries.
“Don’t you think, dear, you had better let your mother meet him?”
inquired Deborah, mildly.
“No, Mother, I don’t,” said the younger generation. “Joe is much less
radical than I, but he always says what he thinks, and so he would make
you very unhappy.”
“Don’t you say what you think, my daughter?”
“Practically never, Mother. I bite my tongue off several times every
hour.”
Deborah said no more, but Betty knew what she would do--and so did
Deborah. What are the secret, underground channels of the blue-bloods,
by which they find out whatever they wish to know? Do they have indexes
and card-files, like the Quaker attorney-general, so that they can
telegraph and ascertain who is who, and what are his family scandals?
Anyhow, the next time Deborah came to town, she knew that Joe’s father
was a “drinking man,” whose wife had divorced him. Fortunately Deborah
hadn’t found out that Joe himself was married; but she imagined the
worst, because divorces are a matter of heredity, like cancer, she said.
Deborah’s hope was to persuade Cornelia and Betty to accompany Betty’s
older sister to Europe for the rest of the summer--since young
Priscilla’s wedding had been put off by the death of her great-aunt,
whose namesake she was. Failing in that, Deborah’s next campaign was to
persuade the pair to come out and spend the summer at the Rupert Alvin
palace on the North Shore. Deborah was lonely, she said, pathetically;
her husband had so many cares just now, owing to the collapse of
business. Deborah even went so far as to promise that Cornelia and
Betty would be free to believe and say what they pleased, and she would
not argue with them--a most remarkable “come-down” for so haughty and
stern a lady.
Anything to get Betty away from the companionship of that dangerous
young Virginian! To divert her with yachting and tennis and
lawn-parties and picnics, in the company of sound and wholesome
graduates of the Harvard “Gold Coast,” their blood free from the
hereditary virus of divorce! But both Cornelia and Betty were obdurate;
they were going to stay cooped up in that hot little apartment all July
and August, to consult lawyers and organize committees and raise funds
for the defense of two anarchist bandits!
XI
The men of the Thornwell family indeed had their hands full that
summer. The expected post-war collapse had come--or rather it had been
brought about by those who realized that prices had got too high, and
that “deflation” was necessary. Naturally, these men wanted to deflate
everybody but themselves, and having the power, they did so. The heads
of the great banking groups, of whom Rupert Alvin was one of the most
careful and conscientious, had devised what they called the “Federal
Reserve System,” a chain of banks financed by the government and run
by the bankers; its function was to enable the great bankers to save
themselves in times of panic, by issuing vast sums of new money, and
lending it to the big industries, whose stocks and bonds are the
mainstay of banking credit. That meant that when a panic came, it was
the little fellows and the outsiders who were “deflated,” while the big
bankers and their friends sat on a rock and waited for the storm to
blow over.
Having this power in their hands, Rupert and his associates in the
course of that summer of 1920 had their Federal Reserve banks suddenly
raise the discount rates in the farming country; the result of which
was to force the dumping of the country’s farm produce on the market.
Prices collapsed to a point where most of the farmers were bankrupt,
and in the Northwest there were whole counties with every single farm
sold for taxes. Meantime the big industrialists of the East, having
bank-credit, were able to hold their products, and close down their
plants and wait.
But if Rupert and his Pilgrim National crowd thought they were going
to have a happy time riding that storm, they learned a sad lesson. The
saying that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, applies to the
kings of modern credit as well as to those of Shakespearean drama. It
was as if Rupert were the guardian of a huge honey-pot, and had the
job of apportioning its contents to all the flies in New England. They
swarmed about him, making a quite terrifying buzzing--and it was a fact
that many of them had stings, more or less dangerous, and threatened
to use them, and sometimes did. Impossible for a great banker to sleep
with all that clamor in his ears! Impossible for any member of his
family to sleep--because there were lady-flies as well as gentleman,
and they too could buzz and sting!
To drop metaphors, it was a fact that a small group of bankers had to
decide, during that panic, which industries of the community were to be
saved and which were to go to the wall. And needless to say, in a place
like Boston, it was not a question of vulgar material efficiency, it
was a question of social status. Who was who, and who was married to
whom, and what was the relative blueness of this blood and that? The
difference between the attitudes of Boston and New York in this matter
are set forth in a story which all financial men delight to tell, about
the New York banker who wrote to a Boston friend, saying that he had a
position for a capable young man. The Boston banker sent one, with a
letter explaining that he was a great-nephew of the late Josiah Quincy
Thornwell, a nephew of John Quincy Thornwell and of Rupert Alvin,
a cousin of the Cabots, and so on. Whereupon the vulgar New Yorker
dismissed the applicant and sent a telegram, reading: “I did not want a
young man for breeding purposes, I wanted one for banking.”
The emergency now was the most desperate the Boston bluebloods had
faced for a long time. It was no mere play question, like belonging to
a Sewing Circle, or getting your daughters into Camp Putnam and the
Friday dances, or your sons into the “Porcellian” and the “Alpha Delta
Phi.” No, it was a question of your very life-blood, that privilege
upon which your family existence was based. So you forgot your good
manners, and fought as your ancestors had fought, in the days before
they had any manners. You threatened and stormed, and raked up ancient,
long-buried family skeletons, and made life miserable for a great
banker who had for years been suffering from high blood pressure, and
had been warned by Morrow, eminent authority upon diseases of the rich.
Rupert became morose under the strain. His pink and purple bulges,
which had seemed to be radiating geniality, now took on the aspect
of a threatened explosion. He fell to grumbling about human nature.
Nobody cared about anything but money; friendship, family pride, honor,
all were gone. He would carry his burden of sorrow for days, and
suddenly it would become too heavy, and he would dump it in some quite
unsuitable place. An elderly widow, a friend of Cornelia’s, sought him
as adviser about the purchase of bonds, and the great and busy head of
the Pilgrim National Bank kept the astonished lady for half an hour
while he impressed upon her the solemn duty of guarding her property.
“Hold on to it! You have nothing else--absolutely nothing! When it is
gone you will discover that nobody respects you, your friends have no
use for you. Nothing counts to-day but money!” The widow-lady might
have had her feelings hurt, but she understood that it was impersonal,
a revelation of the banker-soul.
But for the most part Rupert kept his pessimistic thoughts to pour out
upon his spouse in the privacy of their chamber, after the lights were
out, and they lay in the chaste retirement of their twin beds, under
brocaded blue silk counterpanes. He would expatiate upon the abnormal
greediness of this one and that, and after he had begun to snore,
Deborah would lie still and petition the Lord to soften the hearts
of the greedy ones, and spare her good and noble husband, who was
sacrificing his very life to preserve sound and conservative banking in
New England--which meant, of course, banking under the control of the
Pilgrim National group.
XII
There are some whose claims were not to be questioned. Unthinkable
that any Thornwell should go to the wall, or any one who could claim
kinship, even by marriage. Those huge Thornwell Mills had to have
many millions of credit, to enable them to store their manufactured
products, and turn off their operatives to starve. And of course they
got it; you have only to imagine the hysterics that Clara Thornwell
Scatterbridge would have had in the boudoir of Deborah Thornwell Alvin,
if Rupert had dreamed of refusing! John Quincy Thornwell needed a small
fortune, for a shipping deal he had been putting through on the side;
and he got it from Rupert’s bank. Rupert also needed a fortune, for
some of those subsidiary plants which he and Henry Cabot Winters had
taken away from Jerry Walker, and had kept all to themselves. Rupert
got this money from the Fifth National Bank, of which John Quincy
Thornwell was president. So these big fellows shifted millions about
from their right-hand pockets to their left-hand pockets, and shrewd
lawyers like Henry Cabot Winters were there to tell them exactly how to
do it, so they need never worry if some spy told on them, and caused a
government bank-examiner to drop in.
They knew that their rivals had spies on them, because they had spies
on their rivals. And when these spies would bring in reports of what
was going on, Henry Cabot Winters and the other legal spiders would
be called in to consider how to meet the rivals’ moves. If it was
discovered that some little fellow, having less expensive legal
talent, had slipped up somewhere, and done something which the law did
not allow, then was the time to use your pull with the bank-examiner,
whom you had caused to be appointed a few years ago, and whom you were
going to make into a bank-president in the course of another year or
two--after he had completed the job of putting your rivals out of
business.
That was the way the blue-bloods kept the banking industry a strictly
blue-blooded affair. The foreigners, and especially the Jews, had
got into everything else. For decades they had been boycotted as
department-store owners, but now several of the biggest and most
successful stores were in the hands of Jews. They had got clothing and
wool and leather; they had the theaters, and were breaking into law and
medicine--but they were never going to get the banking-business, not if
Rupert Alvin and the rest of the “high hats” could prevent it. And they
could!
At this time there was a Jewish banker who had broken into the reserve.
Simon Swig was his name--which in itself was enough to demonstrate
the impropriety of allowing a Jew to become directing head of a bank!
He had come into the country as a common immigrant, and now had got
hold of the Tremont Trust Company, an honorable institution, and was
running it on bargain-day principles--paying five and a half per cent
on savings accounts, and advertising the fact, which was unethical,
but brought in the business. He was a rascal, so the blue-bloods
said, and doubtless it was true, but you had to remember that in high
finance rascality is a question of degree. The respectable bankers were
breaking any number of laws, but having the banking authorities in
their clubs, they were not punished. Neither were they exposed, because
they had the newspapers, and their “news bureaus,” run by large stout
subsidized “experts”--whose expertness lay in making the public believe
whatever Rupert Alvin and men of his sort desired.
In the course of that chain of troubles, the state bank-examiners
swooped down one morning and tacked a notice on the door of the Tremont
Trust Company, to the effect that it was closed and forbidden to do
business. And that was all there was to it--the Tremont Trust stayed
closed, and it didn’t do any business. If it had been a “blue-blood”
bank, it would have been “tided over”; instead of which it was turned
over to a “blue-blood” receiver, and paid its savings depositors a
hundred cents on the dollar--which seemed rather to justify the claim
of Simon Swig that it had been sound all along.
XIII
What started the trouble that summer was the problem of Charles Ponzi.
An Italian immigrant who had come to America about the same time as
Vanzetti, and with even less money in his pocket, Ponzi, too, had
washed dishes for a living; but he had not wasted his time dreaming
about “joostice”--no, he was the sort of immigrant America wants, he
had dreamed of making a million dollars in a week, and he had done it.
He discovered a curious situation in international exchange, so he
said; it was possible to buy postal coupons in Vienna, and sell them
at a higher rate in Switzerland, and thus you could turn a thousand
dollars into twenty-five thousand. It made good advertising copy, and
was no more false than what the big bankers were telling the public
about their Federal Reserve System. Anyhow, Ponzi opened a dingy little
office in School Street, quite in the correct Boston tradition--for
many of the big New England corporations had dingy little offices in
some of those two-hundred-year-old houses in dark and narrow streets
which had been laid out by cows.
Charles Ponzi advertised that he would sell you a forty-five-day
certificate, which you were free to redeem at any time, but if you
would wait till the end of the forty-five days, you would get fifty
per cent interest. The tidings spread among the million inhabitants
of Boston, and all those persons who cherished the dream of getting
rich without working came to buy certificates--which meant that Ponzi
had approximately a million customers. Such a mob of people tried to
get into his dingy office all at once that the police reserves had
to be called out to keep them from being crushed to death. In that
suffocating room you saw rich ladies in silks and jewels, newsboys,
street peddlers, workingwomen with babies in their arms, scrubwomen
clutching in their hands the earnings of half a lifetime on their
knees. They all wanted to give it to Ponzi, and he took it, and
fulfilled the immigrant’s dream by buying himself a palace in the
country, with the most expensive custom-built limousine in Boston to
bring him to town.
Ponzi was imperiling the savings banks by causing the public to draw
out all their money; he was buying into the big trust companies, and in
danger of becoming a real banker. Worse yet, he was filling the public
mind with unrest, talking recklessly to the newspapers. He kept saying
that in making a hundred per cent profit in three months he was merely
doing what many big bankers were doing--the difference being that he
was giving the public fifty percent, whereas the big bankers gave only
five percent. If any one were to say how near to the truth that was,
the person would not be believed, so it would be useless to say it.
The bank-examiners and district attorneys got busy, and filled the
papers with rumors that Ponzi was about to be arrested. It was
difficult to take action because the ex-dishwasher was now worth about
twelve million dollars, and actually had five millions cash in Boston
banks, and nobody so rich had ever been arrested in New England.
Moreover, he had hired a very able lawyer, who was later on disbarred
as a “fixer”; he paid that lawyer a million dollars before he got
through, and would undoubtedly have got off, had not Rupert and his
crowd been so determined to get him out of the way.
As often occurs with financial storms, this one got out of control,
and brought down several institutions: the Cosmopolitan Trust,
the Prudential Trust, the Fidelity Trust--it was a rollcall of
respectability. It so happened that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
had several hundred thousand dollars in these banks, and several
counties had as much. The city of Cambridge, the home of Harvard
University, just across the river, was stuck for half a million--the
greater part having been got by a trick played upon the city treasurer
a few months before the crash. All this caused a terrific scandal, and
a long train of consequences most distressing to Rupert Alvin and his
friends. For the examinations of the banks disclosed that many of the
state legislators had been borrowing money without any security, and
had used this money to buy stocks in public utilities, while passing a
bill to triple their value.
Not so long ago the Pilgrim National crowd had driven the Boston
Elevated Railway onto the financial rocks, and taken it over; then,
in order to put it back on its feet, they had jammed through the
legislature a so-called Public Control bill, whereby the Commonwealth
guaranteed dividends to the Elevated stockholders, which made necessary
a ten-cent fare. So here was the blue-blooded and high-hatted and
in all ways ineffable Rupert Alvin playing Santa Claus and angel to
the politicians and legislators of his Commonwealth! The disclosure
was half a year in the future, but that only meant the prolonging of
Rupert’s worry; for of course he knew what was in the records of the
banks, and he knew that when the public has lost a lot of money and
become furiously angry, it is much harder to keep news out of the
papers.
XIV
Another trouble looming, if possible even more serious! Jerry Walker
had come back from his nervous breakdown, and had found out some
details of the intrigue by which Rupert and Henry Cabot Winters had
persuaded the other bankers to join in taking his ten-million-dollar
properties. Jerry had consulted lawyers, and made a deal with one
of them, a bristling little bull-dog of a man who had taken many a
million away from big bankers on previous occasions. Now, under the
law, Jerry had a right to put questions to Rupert, as to what Rupert
had done to him, and Rupert was compelled to answer, under penalty
of being considered to have admitted his guilt! So there would come
to the Pilgrim National crowd and their lawyers long letters full
of questions, agonizingly direct and to the point; and there would
be conferences of great financial and legal personages, and private
conferences in Rupert’s study late at night, in which Rupert and his
brother-in-law would go over what they had done to Jerry, and many
times wish they had done it a little differently!
Betty Alvin found out about this, because she ran into Lucile Walker
in the lobby of one of the hotels. They had not met since Betty’s
departure for Europe, more than a year ago; so they rushed into each
other’s arms, girl fashion, and then adjourned to the tea-room to talk
things over. Lucile had solved her financial and other problems in
the good old established way; she was now Mrs. Percy G. Townsend, her
husband a manufacturer of some kind of electrical equipment. He was
young and enthusiastic, and so was his wife, and they were going to
work hard and build up a business, and then some day one of the big
banking groups would take it over.
Betty told a little about her adventures in Hungary and Russia and
Plymouth, Massachusetts; after which there was an embarrassed pause on
Lucile’s part, and she said, “I suppose you know what Papa is doing?”
When Betty said she didn’t, Lucile told about the suit that was coming;
and when Betty said that she was not taking her father’s side in
his business fights, Lucile told more of the story. It was going to
mean a dreadful lot of publicity for all of them, because those big
State Street bankers would be put on the witness stand and questioned
about the deals they had made, and how they had divided Mr. Walker’s
properties. Betty said she had told her mother that she would never
touch any of that money; just now she was wrestling with the problem
whether she ought to take any money at all from her father. She was
able to earn her own living, and wanted to--but also she wanted to give
her time to organizing a Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and she couldn’t earn
a living at that.
Betty went home and told her grandmother; and so when Cornelia happened
to meet Henry Cabot Winters, she was able to pose as a woman of the
world, in touch with secret news channels. Henry, of course, had
no trouble in guessing how she knew, and there developed a curious
situation. A couple of years ago he had been indignant at the idea
that Jerry Walker might be using Cornelia as a means of getting
information from the Thornwells; but now he wanted to use Cornelia to
get information as to the plans of Jerry Walker! He went so far as to
propose a “swap”: if Cornelia would find out all she could from the
Walkers, Henry would use his inside connections to help Cornelia’s
beloved bandits. He would get in touch with the officials, and find out
what their plans were, and might even be able to find some way to get
those rascals off.
Somehow this tickled Cornelia’s funny-bone, and she burst into
laughter. “You and Rupert must be badly scared,” she said; and after
Henry had made sure that she was not going to talk to the Walkers about
it, he admitted that they were. It was not that they had done anything
wrong--nobody in Boston ever does that--but it was going to be such a
mess, to have the letters and telegrams and confidential memoranda of
a great banking project spread out in the newspapers.
“Can’t you clean out your files?” asked Cornelia, with a twinkle in
her eye. He answered that it wasn’t so easy as it sounded, because
one document referred to the next, and there were copies in a dozen
different banks. If you took out very much, your employees were bound
to know it, and that exposed you to spying and blackmail. Uneasy lies
the head that wears a crown!
XV
Troubles! Troubles! Even in far-off Italy, that summer and fall, people
were occupied in making troubles for Rupert Alvin and his associates.
The big bankers had filled up their vaults with the gold-embossed and
red-sealed financial promises of European governments; and vain was
the hope to save themselves by unloading this paper on the public.
Because after a bank customer had bought it, he generally came back to
leave it as security up to eighty percent of its market value; and how
could Rupert refuse to lend money on a bond which he had certified as
an investment for widows and orphans? So it had come about that every
time a European premier sneezed, Rupert Alvin jumped in his sleep; when
the anarchists paraded in Milan or Turin and waved their black flags,
Rupert couldn’t sleep at all.
That summer the radical labor unions of Italy made their long expected
coup--moving in and taking possession of the principal steel and
machine plants of the country. But having got in, they didn’t know what
to do next, because they could not turn a wheel of the plants without
coal, and the coal had to come from England or America, in English
or American ships, upon English or American credit. Were English
or American coal men going to extend credit to Italian anarchists,
anarcho-syndicalists, communist-anarchists and left-wing socialists?
The coal men of England and America, like all the other big business
men of those countries, were going to do what their Rupert Alvins
told them; and the Rupert Alvins said thumbs down on Reds. So the
Italian workers had to make peace with their masters, and give up
the plants; and then it was necessary for the masters to organize a
counter-revolutionary government, to break up the labor unions and kill
off the leaders. To do that they had to have the machinery of reaction
and slaughter--and where else should they come for it but to America?
So it happened that Rupert Alvin, in the midst of all his troubles
with Ponzi, and Simon Swig, and the half dozen closed banks, and the
threatened Elevated Railway scandal, and the hiding of evidence in the
Jerry Walker case, and the unhappiness over Betty and Cornelia--with
all this nightmare-load riding his shoulders, Rupert Alvin had to
interview agents of the banking and manufacturing interests of Italy,
and listen to plans for the coup d’état which was to turn that country
into a dictatorship of big capital. No possible way to avoid it--unless
all the money that had been loaned to Italy during and since the war
was to be lost. The bankers of Boston and New York and Philadelphia and
Chicago had to get together and do for Italy what they had already done
for Hungary and Roumania and Czechoslovakia and Finland and Esthonia
and Latvia and Lithuania--so many miserable little bonded states that
it gave a hundred percent American a headache to learn the names.
And meantime Bartolomeo Vanzetti paced his cell, in the space eight
feet by one and a half allotted him for pacing. He knew what was
happening, because his friends brought him a few facts, and he could
reconstruct the rest, with that clear mind which understood social
forces. He knew that it meant the ruin of all his hopes, all chance of
freedom for the peasants and wage-slaves of Italy for years, perhaps
decades. He knew what the American bankers would do; he foretold
how, when the time came to float the loan, they would have the
newspapers bought and the propaganda ready, and would carry the mass of
Italian-Americans into reaction with them. Meantime they had Vanzetti
in jail, where he was safe--and they were going to see to it that he
stayed!