THE DECISION
I
On July twenty-ninth it was announced that the decision would be
given out on the third of August. That was a Wednesday, the day the
Governor’s council met; and this fact might have significance, because,
if he were going to grant clemency, the council would have to assent.
Shreds of evidence like that caused hope to rise in the balance. Rumors
would come, one way or the other; the Governor had said this, he had
asked that.
Joe Randall never wavered in his pessimism. “Fuller has no idea but
death; he never has had it for an instant, and he never will.” But some
of the other newspaper men thought differently; said one: “You can’t
tell me that a man so happy would send two human beings to the chair!”
Others had talked with members of the council, who told, in confidence,
of definite statements the Governor had made. The New York _Times_
correspondent sent his paper a detailed story to the effect that the
Governor meant to postpone the execution, and ask the legislature to
pass a special act providing for a new trial. The New York _World_ had
the same story; the _Herald Tribune_ followed.
On the day before August third a peculiar development. Calvin Coolidge,
President of the United States, was spending his summer vacation in the
Rockies, catching trout with worms, and having himself photographed in
ten-gallon hats and other moving picture appurtenances. He received the
newspaper “boys” on his front porch and handed them a typewritten slip
of paper reading, “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen
twenty-eight.” This economical sentence caused a thrill in the bosoms
of great numbers of public men; and enemies of Alvan T. Fuller imagined
that it decided the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. Careful newspapers
like the New York _Times_ and _World_ do not often let themselves be
fooled as in this case--so these suspicious ones argued; something must
have changed the mind of the supersalesman on the night of the second
of August, causing him to give up the idea of clemency. Could it have
been a vision of himself, following the footsteps of “Cautious Cal”
up the political ladder; sweeping the next Republican convention in a
storm of enthusiasm for another hero who had “crushed the Reds”?
Whether there was any truth in this wild guess, none could say, except
Fuller himself. But this much is certain, he desperately wanted
that nomination; and it is interesting to note what happened in the
following year, when the Republican convention assembled. The name of
Alvan T. Fuller was put before the little group of rich men’s agents
who meet in a hotel room and determine nominations for president and
vice-president. The Governor’s friends set forth the heroic deed that
he had done, and the storm of fervor which this deed would rouse in the
bosoms of all patriots. But the politicians of 1928 remarked coldly
that this was not 1920. “The Republican party cannot afford to debate
the Sacco-Vanzetti case from now until the end of the campaign!”
There was not a single vote for the supersalesman; and so furious was
he in his disappointment that he refused to let ex-Governor Cox of
Massachusetts have the nomination in his place. To Senator Butler,
over the long-distance telephone wire, he said: “It will be Fuller or
nobody!”
II
August third, the day of the decision. The State House press room and
Governor’s office were not big enough to hold the mob of reporters, and
for the first time in Massachusetts history the legislative chamber was
turned over to their use, and the press gallery equipped with telegraph
wires. More than eighty men, like hunting-dogs held in leash, leaping
and barking. The whole outside world was clamoring for every detail
having to do with that scene.
The interest in the case had grown, until it was like nothing in
history; great newspapers in New York, which had given several inches
to the conviction of the men, were now giving pages to the struggle for
a new trial.
Somehow the working classes of all nations had come to know about this
case, and had made it their own. They were listening to fiery orators,
taking part in parades, throwing bricks through American window glass,
setting off bombs in front of embassies and legations. To the ruling
class element of Massachusetts this was a proof of the worst they
had been told about world Bolshevism; it was a diabolical conspiracy
against the good name of the Commonwealth, and to meet it these
righteous persons summoned the spirits of their Puritan ancestors, who
had withstood persecution and torture at the hands of royal despots
and their priestly monitors. The louder the clamor on behalf of the
anarchists, the less chance that it would be heeded--so said the
stiff-necked ones.
The Governor had not come to his office; rumor had it that he was
working on his decision in an unnamed hotel. Over at the Sacco-Vanzetti
headquarters in Hanover street, a couple of rooms in a dingy office
building with time-worn floors, there were reporters and photographers,
bootleggers and poets, Italian laborers and Harvard professors, seated
on boxes, bundles of papers, tables and rickety chairs, waiting,
waiting. On the walls were posters in many languages, calling for
mass-meetings to save Sacco and Vanzetti; one in French, signed by
cabinet ministers, referring to “Calvary,” which would have pleased
Bart; one in German, saying “Justice is dead”; one from Mexico, saying
“Freedom and Justice.” Bart was right--his name had come to have a
meaning!
Cornelia Thornwell stayed in her apartment, and friends came in to keep
the watch with her and divert her mind. But no one could talk about
anything but the decision. Now and then the phone would ring, and her
heart would jump so that it hurt; when it proved to be more delay, she
would sink back in her chair, feeling faint. Creighton Hill, a young
newspaperman who was heart and soul for the defense, came in to cheer
her; the afternoon papers were full of hints of a reprieve; everybody
was hopeful. Judge Webster Thayer was in Ogunquit, Maine, and at the
Cliff Country Club that morning had made 18 holes in 84.
Waiting, waiting. Evening, and still the Governor had not come to
his office. Crowds gathered at the State House, and were driven back.
The decision would be late, said the secretary. Betty, who was at
headquarters, phoned to her grand-mother--for the tenth time, trying
to brace the tortured soul to meet the coming shock. “Joe says the
brute is holding up the decision so that we won’t be able to get in
any answer to-night. He wants the front page of the morning papers to
himself!”
So it proved. At twenty minutes past eleven at night, the last moment
when it would be possible to put the text of the decision into the
main editions of the big newspapers, and when there was no longer
a chance that any friend of the defense could prepare a reply, or
find any distracted reporter able to listen to one--at that moment
the Governor’s secretary appeared with a stack of envelopes, each
containing seven mimeographed sheets. The reporters grabbed them, and
tore them open as they ran. The word “Die” went by telegraph and cable
to five continents, and in a few minutes there were “extras” on the
streets in big cities, with streamer headlines across the front page:
“Sacco and Vanzetti Doomed to Die”--“Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, Says
Fuller”--“Sacco and Vanzetti Guilty, and Will Die.”
III
Wonderful, wonderful was the judicial system of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, as portrayed in those seven mimeographed sheets!
Throughout all this complicated and difficult case it had functioned
without one single slip. The judge had been upright and impartial,
the jury had been conscientious and fair, the witnesses--for the
Commonwealth--had been clear-eyed and unafraid, the Supreme Judicial
Court had been infallible. And now came the supersalesman of
automobiles, and with his eagle eye he surveyed the procedure, seeking
a flaw. Patiently he had studied every word of the record, the later
appeals and decisions; he had interviewed jurors and witnesses, and
made sure that everything was perfect; now he mounted the rostrum and
told the civilized world about it, putting the final seal of completion
upon the performance.
One after another he took some aspect of the case, and after
mentioning the criticisms of it, disposed of them in one or two
majestic and final sentences. First, the jury. “I find that the
jurors were thoroughly honest men ... I can see no warrant for the
assertion that the jury trial was unfair.” The fact that the elderly
flag-saluting foreman of the jury had said, on his way to duty, “Damn
them, they ought to hang them anyway!”--that was a detail so trivial
that an enthusiastic supersalesman did not bother to report it.
And then “Web” Thayer. “Affidavits have been presented claiming that
the judge was prejudiced. I see no evidence of prejudice in his conduct
of the trial.” The eagle eye had inspected those passages in the record
where “Web” had connived at the job of hiding from the jury the fact
that Goodridge was an admitted thief; that had been fair. The eagle
eye had seen “Web” butting in to discredit the witness Kurlansky, the
shop-keeper who had failed to stop the district attorney and police
from “framing” the testimony of Lola Andrews; that had been fair. “Web”
had permitted the district attorney to browbeat Sacco for not knowing
what was not true about Harvard College; that had been fair. “Web” had
sneered seven times at the defense lawyers for claiming something which
they hadn’t claimed; that, too, had been fair. He had let the district
attorney tell the jury that Proctor had testified something that
Proctor had in fact refused to testify, and that the district attorney
knew he had refused to testify; that likewise had been fair. “Web”
himself had told the jury the same thing; and that had been fairest of
all.
And then the appeals for a new trial, based upon new evidence that
had been found: evidence of the foreman’s prejudice and misconduct,
of Goodridge’s criminal career and perjury upon the witness-stand;
the retractions of Lola Andrews and Louis Pelzer; the confession of
the head of the State Police that he had conspired with the district
attorney’s office to misrepresent his testimony to the jury; the new
evidence of Gould, Kelly and Kennedy, deliberately withheld from
the defense. Said the supersalesman: “I have examined all of these
motions and read the affidavits in support of them to see whether they
presented any valid reason for granting the men a new trial. I am
convinced that they do not.”
And the judge’s handling of these appeals and motions--that, too,
had been complete and marvelous perfection! Everything that he had
done--including his lying about the affidavits, and saying that they
said what they didn’t say; his misrepresentation of Supreme Court
decisions, his misquoting of testimony, his making up of passages which
he said were in the testimony, but which were not in the testimony--all
that had been perfect, and “Web’s” motives in doing these things had
been as pure as the driven snow in Boston. Said the supersalesman: “I
am further convinced that the presiding judge gave no evidence of bias
in denying them all and refusing a new trial.”
The supersalesman pronounced Vanzetti guilty of the Bridgewater crime,
and stressed the fact that he had failed to take the stand in his own
behalf--although it was the perfect law of the perfect Commonwealth
that he didn’t have to take the stand if he didn’t want to, and that
his failure to do so was not to be used against him. The supersalesman
was so sure that the men were guilty that he was not content to say it
once, he said it twice about Sacco and three times about Vanzetti; he
was so sure the trial was fair that he said it five times--and added
for good measure: “The proceedings were without a flaw.” He put in
an eloquent description of the South Braintree crime, with emphasis
upon its brutality, which made fine melodrama for the newspapers; and
then he wound up in a blaze of glory, putting himself in the center
of the picture, with jury and witnesses about him. “I am proud to be
associated in this public service with clear-eyed witnesses, unafraid
to tell the truth, and with jurors who discharged their obligations in
accordance with their convictions and their oaths.”
IV
Ten or a dozen persons crowded into the little living-room of the
apartment adjoining Cornelia’s, where lived Betty and Joe. The seven
mimeographed pages had been read aloud, and passages read over again,
and marked with exclamation points and question marks. Hours passed
while the clamor and excitement continued. Nobody thought of sleep;
impossible ever to sleep in the world again--let sleep be banished from
Boston, as punishment for this atrocity! The language of some of the
younger men and women was unfit for the older ones to hear; but the
older ones realized that this was a special occasion, like nothing in
Boston history. The air of the room became gray with tobacco smoke, and
the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution was broken, along with
the laws against blasphemy and sedition; for some radicals could not
stand the strain of this ordeal, any more than could the conservatives,
without help from Italian bootleggers.
Joe was at his typewriter, banging away, with a green shade over his
eyes; preparing a story to be put on the wires for the early editions
of afternoon papers. He was making copies for other newspaper men,
hoping they would get this point and that. Now and then the company
would interrupt him--to make sure he had got some other point. Over
at defense headquarters was another indignation meeting, and there
was telephoning, back and forth, exchanging ideas and information.
Quotations had to be looked up in the record, and falsehoods nailed
down.
How they hated the supersalesman of automobiles--and how they raged
at the trick he had played upon them, whereby millions, yes, tens of
millions of people would read that statement at their breakfast tables
and on their way to work--and would not get the answer of the committee
until hours later, and then only in fragmentary form, or not at all!
The fingers of men and women trembled as they pointed out passages of
especial treachery.
Cornelia Thornwell, old-fashioned and hopelessly out of date, had
notions about the dignity and honor of the office which the great
Josiah Quincy Thornwell had once filled. It seemed to her that a
Governor of the Commonwealth, mounting the rostrum and addressing
the civilized world on an issue involving the lives of two human
beings--that such a Governor ought at least to tell the truth.
“Wouldn’t you think he’d leave out errors that can be proved by the
record?”
Said Betty, “I’d expect him to lie like Satan.”
They would fall upon the seven mimeographed sheets again. Look at this!
Look at that! Look at what he put in about Madeiros! “I give no weight
to the Madeiros confession. It is popularly supposed he confessed to
committing this crime.” What did the man mean by that sentence? He
didn’t explain it--he went on to state his reasons for distrusting
Madeiros, but not a word about what was “popularly supposed”! The words
could only mean that the popular impression was mistaken, Madeiros had
not “confessed to committing this crime.” Every reader would get that
meaning, and no other meaning. The actual words written by Madeiros had
been: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company
crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”
Then, an even shrewder trick--a little masterpiece of treachery, as
cunningly contrived as the Proctor evasion, and Katzmann’s bogus answer
to it, and “Web” Thayer’s obfuscations of both! The supersalesman
summed up Sacco’s alibi--that he “claimed to have been at the Italian
consulate in Boston on that date but the only confirmation of this
claim is the memory of a former employee of the consulate who made a
deposition in Italy,” etc. Study that sentence, all forgers, traducers
and betrayers of all future time, and learn how to smile and be
a villain still! The art of falsifying while seeming to tell the
truth has never been carried to a higher stage--not in any form of
supersalesmanship yet devised in the great empire of superproduction,
or taught in the Graduate School of Business Administration of Harvard
University.
Strictly and literally, it was the truth that Sacco had produced only
one witness to testify that he had been “at the Italian Consulate in
Boston on that date.” But Sacco had produced five other witnesses who
testified that he had been _in Boston_ on that date! Affe, the grocer,
had testified that Sacco had paid him a bill, and Affe had produced
on the stand a notebook with a memorandum of the payment, showing the
date. Bosco and Guadagni, the editors, had testified to lunching with
Sacco in Boni’s restaurant on that day, and Dentamaro, department
manager of a bank, and Williams, an advertising agent, had testified
to joining the group and chatting. Still more to the point, several
of these witnesses had testified that Sacco, in the course of the
talk, had told them the purpose for which he was in Boston, to visit
the consulate and get his passports! Oh, treachery and double-dealing
beyond all imagining--first, the Lowell commission hushing Bosco and
Guadagni to silence, and doctoring the record of the proceedings in
order to keep the story from the public; and then the mighty super
salesman, stepping onto the rostrum and addressing the whole civilized
world, telling it that Bosco and Guadagni did not exist!
V
Cornelia lay in bed, a reaction from the long strain. The Negro maid
brought her coffee and toast, but she could not eat; she lay like one
dead. It was all over for her; she had done all she could, struggled
all she could--so she told herself. The young people might go on, Joe
might write newspaper stories, trying to rouse a heedless public;
Betty might organize mass meetings and speeches on the Common, but the
runaway grandmother’s race was run.
She had to lie there and bring herself to face the thought of the
electric chair. Through all these seven dreadful years, she had refused
to face it--a game of self-deception; but Bart and Nick had been right
all along--they had known that the thought must be faced, and they had
done it. They had the will, and the philosophy; they had been able to
talk about it and joke. Now Cornelia must do the same thing. Remember
what somebody had told her--it does not hurt, because the current
destroys the brain before there is time for a sensation. And when it
is over, it is really over; other persons may worry for you, but you
don’t worry for yourself. Also, you are a martyr, you have accomplished
something for the cause you love.
That was what she must manage to realize. Persuade herself that there
was a new generation coming, that would care where this one was
indifferent; that would count it as something important that two wops
had denied themselves happiness so that justice might be born into the
world! Think about those young persons of the future; lie here and shut
your eyes, and let them come into your presence and speak to you; feel
their gentle hands upon your forehead, bidding you to rest, your tense
nerves to relax and your heart to stop pounding.
Cornelia lay wrestling thus; and into her mind came drifting words
of comfort. “Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our
triumph.” Vanzetti speaking; where had she heard him say those
words? On a chair by her bedside was a scrap-book, full of letters,
manuscripts, clippings. She was moved to sit up and turn the pages;
here it was. Shortly after Judge Thayer had sentenced the two men to
die, Cornelia had persuaded a reporter for the North American Newspaper
Alliance to go to Dedham with her, and see what kind of men these
alleged bandits were. Now, reading the interview, Cornelia recalled
every detail of the scene; the prisoners coming down from their tier of
cells, getting a glimpse of sunshine in the central hall, and lighting
up with it--Nick, with his “kid’s” grin, Bart with his mature and
gentle smile. The reporter, Phil D. Stong, a big fellow, rather blond
German face, well-fed and well-groomed--on an expense account, as he
told Cornelia, with a laugh; tender-hearted, with the sentimentality
of his race--and struck dumb by the discovery of two men of this
transparent sincerity and fine idealism in the shadow of the electric
chair, face to face with their last enemy and not afraid of him. He
had listened, while the victims did the talking; then he had gone away
and tried to make a picture of the scene for the readers of a chain of
newspapers.
“Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written
in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face. Tears touch the
young man ‘Nick’s’ eyes for a moment, brightly, but his voice is
steady. He is married to a sweet-faced little Italian woman. They
have two children.
“In a moment, Nick, with his smooth pompadour, and his boy’s face,
is laughing with the deputy sheriff in argument about prison fare.
“Vanzetti regards one kindly, but appraisingly. A ferocious
mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought
is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence
has made an anchorite.”
And then a glimpse of prison life:
“Up from the shops comes a file of gray men, arms folded, faces
expressionless--a rhythm of steps and faces.
“‘They been working.’ Sacco’s fingers move nervously. ‘God, when
I cannot work I almost go crazy. My fingers used to be busy. I
beg, I argue--give me something to do--I shovel coal, anything. At
last, they give me brick to clean--after three years. You see me
now? I gain a pound a day for thirty days.’ The deputy sheriff nods
confirmation.
“‘First they give me basket to weave, like children. Better than
nothing, but not much. Then I sit alone--seven years--thousands
of days--and all for say man’s nature can be perfect--day after
day--nothing do--breathe, eat, sit up, lie down--because I think
man innerly noble--not beast--’
“Vanzetti interrupts his companion gently. He knows the two
visitors believe in the enforced regulations which restrain
fallible humanity.
“‘We’re capitalists,’ he says smiling, and pointing to the line of
workers. (Men under sentence of death are given no work.) ‘We have
home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re non-producers--live off other
man’s work. When libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me
names.’
“Sacco gurgles with amusement. The deputy sheriff appears
significantly. Suddenly one realizes that these men are to die in a
straight wooden chair, just as the world begins its summer holidays.
“Nick and Vanzetti see the new expression and understand. They
smile, gravely, sympathetically, as men smile at a child’s troubles.
“‘If it had not been for these thing,’ says Vanzetti, ‘I might
have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men.
I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a
failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life
can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s
onderstanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
“‘Our words--our lives--our pains--nothing! The taking of our
lives--lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler--all! That
last moment belong to us--that agony is our triumph!’
“Not declaimed, just said simply.”
VI
There were tears in Cornelia’s eyes as she finished. “Oh, beautiful!
Beautiful!” And when Joe came in, later in the day, she showed him the
clipping. “Those are marvelous words--those two paragraphs at the end.
I wonder if you couldn’t quote them again, and get people to read them.”
Joe said that he would try it. In order to give a touch of drama, he
put a headline: “Vanzetti to his Judges.” The two paragraphs were taken
up and reproduced in labor papers, and became, as it were, a spiritual
testament of Vanzetti, an untheological prayer which his friends
carried about with them, and read while he was dying, and afterwards.
Because of the title, people assumed that the words had been a part
of a speech in court; but this was not so, they were spoken, quite
simply and casually, to a newspaper reporter, the every-day stuff of
Vanzetti’s mind.
History records that those who heard the Gettysburg address of Abraham
Lincoln were ill pleased by it. They found it brief and inadequate,
and gave all their praise to the flowery discourse of the great Edward
Everett of Boston. But the future seldom chooses words which are
flowery; it chooses those which have been wrung from the human heart
in moments of great suffering, and which convey a gleam of spiritual
illumination. When such words have been spoken, we discover what Paul
meant when he wrote, “this mortal shall put on immortality.” School
children learn them by heart, and libraries are written to interpret
them; they are graven upon marble and cast in bronze; armies carry them
on banners, temples arise to glorify them, and civilizations are built
in their image.
Pass on, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, your work is done! You have fought the
good fight, you have finished the race! Fear not the executioner, nor
yet the raging slanderer--they are powerless to harm you, for you
have carried out your life-purposes--including that incidental one of
becoming a great master of English prose! You have spoken the noblest
words heard in America in the two generations since Abraham Lincoln
died! You have achieved what is called the “grand manner,” so rare in
literature! That simplicity whereby men become as little children, and
enter into the kingdom of heaven; that dignity which causes the critics
to bow their haughty heads; that tenderness which touches the heart,
that rapture which fires it, that sublimity which brings men to their
knees!
In short, old Bart, you have brought the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
back into the literary world again! After many years, New England has
another great writer--for a short while only, until it has sent two
thousand volts of electricity through his brain! What an odd freak of
history, that this great one should be a despised wop! That, after all
the millions spent upon education, he should not be a graduate of a
college, nor even of a high school! That he should not even be able to
spell correctly, nor to pronounce correctly, the language of which he
is to be the glory!
What a satire upon great endowments, the huge masses of steel and
stone, the deans and professors of this and that long-winded subject!
As a result of their labors, there are a million persons in the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts who understand the correct use of past
participles, and would not say, “I might have live”; yet there is not
a single one of these millions who can speak a sentence that stands a
chance of living! There are ten thousand graduates of Harvard College,
every one of whom knows better than to say “onderstand” or “joostice”;
yet there is only a handful who understand justice, and not one who
will die for it!
VII
The fears of the defense, that they could not get their answer
before the public, proved to be groundless. In truth, no answer was
needed--the weaknesses of the Governor’s statement were so apparent.
Impossible to take the lives of two men upon the basis of such an
argument! There was a cry of dismay, so shrill that it penetrated even
to the sanctum of supersalesmanship. A sudden panic among the “State
House gang”; something must be done, and done quickly. The academic
autocrats were summoned to the defense of their Governor, and three
days later there appeared what was called the “report” of Lowell,
Grant, and Stratton to the Governor.
It was much longer than the earlier document, and in its heavy style
bore the marks of having been composed by President Lowell. It was
argumentative where Fuller’s had been assertive; it was fumbling where
his had been jaunty. The feebleness and confusion of its arguments
suggested the operation of aged minds. To disinterested persons, the
most striking fact was that the report could be judged without knowing
anything about the case. The elderly gentlemen had managed to make
their ineffectiveness evident in almost every paragraph.
Suppose, for example, that you picked up your morning paper, and read
what the Commission had to say about the evidence of Roy Gould, the
man who had got a bullet hole through his overcoat. “He certainly had
an unusually good position to observe the men in the car, but on the
other hand his evidence is merely cumulative.” What would you make out
of that? Assuming that you knew the meaning of the word “cumulative,”
why was evidence less valid because it was that? Wasn’t it the nature
of good evidence to be cumulative, and didn’t you try to make it as
cumulative as possible? Try some other word in that sentence: “his
evidence is merely convincing” or, “his evidence is merely conclusive”!
Then that amazing and incredible sentence, in which the three elderly
Brahmins summed up their meditations on the subject of one of their
victims: “On the whole, we are of the opinion that Vanzetti was guilty
of murder beyond reasonable doubt.” What did the three elderly Brahmins
mean by a man’s being guilty “on the whole”? Or by their being of the
opinion “on the whole”? Did they mean that there was some part of them
which was not of the opinion? Or did they mean that there was some part
of Vanzetti which was not guilty? On the Saturday when this report
was given out, the New York _Times_ made an effort to elucidate this
question; and the New York _Times_ is an important newspaper, whose
queries are apt to be heeded, even by blue-blood college presidents.
But apparently the Commission on the whole had decided on the whole
that it would be safer on the whole to take no chances on the whole.
The New York _Times_ recorded that “efforts to reach members of
the committee to clear up the exact meaning of ‘on the whole’ were
unavailing.”
But imagine the scorn and fury of young radicals--reading that
sentence, and not waiting to have the exact meaning cleared up! Said
Mistress Betty, now become ferocious: “Is he going to execute Bart on
the whole, or is he going to execute him completely?” She pictured the
august President of Harvard University appearing before the Judgment
Throne, and being informed that he was to be sent to hell on the whole,
and roasted for eternity on the whole!
VIII
The three elderly blue-bloods had had a comparatively simple task
laid out for them; they had been asked to decide whether Sacco and
Vanzetti had had a fair trial. Was it owing to their age, or to their
inexperience with criminal matters, or to their overwhelming prejudice,
that they had been unable to stick to their task, but must keep
confusing it with the question whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty?
The latter they could not possibly determine; they had neither the
time, nor the facilities, nor the training, nor the temperament. But
their self-assurance was such that they attempted it; with the result
that they fell to guessing, like everybody else, and they were so naïve
as to reveal this to a horrified world.
Thus, in declining to accept the story of Madeiros, they remarked: “If
he were tried, his own confession, if wholly believed, would not be
sufficient for a verdict of murder in the first degree.” Just what was
the significance of that? Were the old gentlemen suggesting that two
birds in the hand were better than one in the bush? And then, their
extraordinary statement, that the evidence of Gould was “balanced” by
that of Tootsie Toodles! Joe Randall said that such “balancing” ought
to be exhibited on the vaudeville stage.
The handling of the Proctor confession had come to be a test of the
honesty of official persons in Massachusetts; and it proved that
each new person would find some new method of dodging the truth. The
three elderly blue-bloods showed themselves fully as cunning as their
predecessors. Said they: “Counsel for the defendants claim that the
form of the question and the answer was devised to mislead the jury.”
That was a fact; and it was an instance of how to lie while stating
a fact. Counsel “claimed” it; but why put the burden of the “claim”
onto counsel, when counsel were merely restating the confession of
Proctor? And then to go on and say: “But it must be assumed that the
jury understood the meaning of plain English words.” These learned
Boston gentlemen claiming that Proctor had used “plain English words,”
when Proctor himself had stated that he had used obscure English words,
and for the purpose of confusing the jury! Let the common sense of
mankind judge whether a jury of mechanics and working people would find
no obscurity in the statement that the mortal bullet was _consistent
with_ having been fired by the Sacco pistol! And when both the district
attorney and the judge had pretended to misunderstand it, and had told
them that it meant what it did not mean!
And then to be nasty, and hint that their own high police official,
who had served them faithfully for forty years, and now was dead and
unable to defend himself, had made his confession because the district
attorney had refused to pay him five hundred dollars for his expert
testimony!
To Cornelia Thornwell this report meant the end of all things; her
joy in life was gone. For prejudice and trickery on the part of a
motor-car salesman she could make snobbish allowances; but in the
case of A. Lawrence Lowell no such recourse was available, he was her
kind of person, the best she had to offer. For years she had gone to
commencements, and listened to his ponderous wisdom, and thought he was
a great man; and here in a test she discovered that he had listened to
all the gossip, and swallowed the whole “theory”!
She knew what would happen, if she went out among her friends to argue
against this report. The friends would gaze at her in dismay. “But, my
dear, _Mr. Lowell_ says they are guilty!” If she persisted, the friends
would add, “But my dear, Mr. Lowell _investigated_ the case! He gave
more than half his vacation to it!” Those who knew her well, including
the members of the family, would say, “But Mother, you _wanted_ Mr.
Lowell, and now you won’t abide by what he says!”
Impossible to make headway against such a tide! In New York men could
read that report, and judge it for what it was, a revelation of the
mental breakdown of a once-great civilization; but in Boston hardly any
one could judge it, Mr. Lowell did the thinking of half the city. He
was a god, and had descended from his throne, and devoted his mighty
intellect to the affairs of two obscure wops; now for these wops
and their supporters to refuse to accept his verdict was not merely
blasphemy, it was ingratitude and impertinence.
IX
William G. Thompson withdrew from the case. One more lawyer had failed;
one more lawyer had made enemies, and thought it would help Sacco and
Vanzetti if he took himself out of the way. But each time it was made
clear that the cause of the hatred was Sacco and Vanzetti, no one
else; the new lawyer, whoever he might be, would be as much hated as
the old one.
They took Cornelia’s advice, and went to the old stock, and retained
Mr. Arthur Dehon Hill. Silver hair and rosy cheeks and a manner of
complete assurance, he should have been Arthur Beacon Hill, according
to Joe Randall. He was so correct that he dared to make jokes about it.
Real “Old Boston,” he thought that every criminal, even an anarchist,
was entitled to a fair trial, and to have a lawyer do the best for him
that the legal game allowed. But to his surprise he discovered that a
great many persons, even lawyers, were strongly disapproving of his
conduct in defending these enemies of society.
He started work on Saturday, the sixth of August; and on the night
of Wednesday, the tenth, his clients were due to die: rather a short
time-limit for the mastering of a complicated case! He began with an
appeal to the Governor to extend the time; and the Governor replied
by silence. He filed notice of an appeal to Judge Thayer for a new
trial, on the basis of newly discovered evidence, and also--delightful
inspiration!--on the ground that Sacco and Vanzetti had not had a fair
trial, because the trial judge had been prejudiced! Judge Thayer agreed
to give up making golf-scores in Ogunquit, Maine, and appear in Dedham
Court House on Monday morning, to judge whether Judge Thayer had been
prejudiced against Sacco and Vanzetti!
Also Mr. Hill started an appeal before Justice Sanderson of the Supreme
Judicial Court, to try to get another motion before the full bench of
that Court. Some jumping about for one lawyer, especially when all
the courts closed at noon on Saturday. Elias Field was helping, and
also Michael Angelo Musmanno, a young lawyer who had been sent on from
Pittsburgh by some Italian societies. A naïve and warm-hearted person,
Catholic and conservative, he had fallen in love with an anarchist
infidel and an anarchist atheist, and was bewildered by the hatred
which unloving Boston felt for his clients. A hectic three weeks the
young lawyer spent chasing about New England and Canada, in motor cars,
and now and then in airplanes, hunting supreme court judges on vacation.
Other lawyers giving advice, some of them secretly. One was Henry
Cabot Winters--hush, not a word! He would call Cornelia on the phone.
“Mother, I don’t want to get mixed up in this, but you’d better tell
those fellows not to overlook saving all their exceptions as basis of
a writ of certiorari to the Federal courts; and tell Hill not to let
‘Web’ get a single point on him--challenge his right to hear a word,
or decide any issue, on the basis that it is a prejudiced decision.
And when you go to a Federal judge, don’t overlook Moore v. Dempsey
261 U.S. 86.” Cornelia would have to say, “Wait! Wait! Let me get
that down!” She had been wrestling with the powers that ruled her
Commonwealth for seven years, but she had not yet learned to have a
pencil and pad at the telephone.
Also professors of the Harvard Law School helping--and no secret
about that, but on the contrary, picturesque scandals for the Hearst
newspapers! A war between the law school and rest of the university,
between Frankfurter and Lowell! Lowell had been disapproving of Jews as
professors, ever since eight years ago, when another of them, Laski,
had made a speech to the wives of striking policemen, while Lowell was
preparing to lend the students of his university for strikebreakers.
Now here was Frankfurter defending two anarchists in a book, while
Lowell was sentencing the incendiary pair to death.
A pretty fight, difficult to keep within the limits of academic
propriety! Not so long ago, the great Lowell had dealt a strong punch
to the Jewish jaw, in the shape of a program to limit the percentage of
such students allowed in Harvard; he proposed to do it openly, instead
of secretly, as the custom was. He gave his reasons--among them that
one hundred per cent of the books stolen from the university library
were stolen by Jews. When this statement was investigated, the evidence
turned out to be that one Jewish student had one library book which he
had forgotten.
And now here were the Harvard alumni, rallying to the aid of their
blue-blood president, by refusing to contribute to the law school
endowment, so long as Felix Frankfurter remained a professor; they were
making a regular campaign out of this. Among those who had publicly
joined it was Mr. Ranney, the new assistant district attorney from
Norfolk County, who had been opposing the Sacco-Vanzetti defense before
the Governor; also that blandly smiling blue-blood lawyer, Mr. Joseph
Wiggin, who had been the Governor’s private counsel, present at all
hearings. “You see what kind of advice Fuller is getting!” said Henry
Cabot Winters.
X
Disputes at headquarters of the Sacco-Vanzetti committee; factions
clashing, radicals jeering at conservatives. “Now you see! You obeyed
your respectable lawyers! You were good, and didn’t make any noise,
you trusted to legal precedents--and where have you got? If you had
listened to us, if you had spent the money to make an appeal to labor,
we could have had a general strike now, and the boys would have been
saved!” But even now the conservatives wouldn’t agree. Mrs. Evans
thought it necessary to bow to the Governor’s decision; while the
communists wanted to make a mass appeal for a strike all over the
country. Impossible to decide on a single move; and meantime the clock
was ticking away the minutes and hours of the victims’ lives!
Those who believed in picketing and street demonstrations proceeded
to organize and send out a call for martyrs. On Sunday afternoon
there were to be mass meetings on the Common; the socialists and the
communists each had a “tree,” and as usual, they announced rival
meetings. Superintendent of Police Michael J. Crowley announced
that he would attend both. For the first time in Boston history
the entire police force of twenty-two hundred men were on what was
known as “twenty-four hour duty.” All vacations were canceled, extra
men were brought from other cities, the firemen were sworn in as
deputies, the state constabulary were ready with armored cars, riot
guns, searchlights and gas bombs. Said the sharp-tongued Betty, “The
Commonwealth has told ten thousand lies, and each lie must have a club
and a gun to protect it!”
Between Boston Common and the park known as the Public Gardens there
extends a wide esplanade, half a mile long, lined with old elm trees;
since as far back in history as the oldest citizen’s great-grandfather
could remember, this had been the temple of Boston’s free speech.
The trees were numbered, and every Sunday afternoon the advocates of
anything would have a tree assigned to them, where they might set up a
soap box and stand thereon, and say what they pleased to all who cared
to listen--with only such interference as came from the voices of the
orators under the other trees.
But now the government of Massachusetts had officially endorsed ten
thousand lies, and staked its official existence upon them; the
one thing it could not stand was to have these lies exposed to the
general gaze. Under the socialist tree were women carrying banners,
containing the sentence once spoken by the just and upright and utterly
unprejudiced Mr. Justice Thayer. He was to speak again from the bench
to-morrow morning, and tell all the world how just and upright and
utterly unprejudiced he was. Now here was a banner: “Did you see what I
did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” The makers of the banner
had left the bad word blank, but that did not improve matters, because
there is no limit to what the human imagination may insert in a blank.
People might imagine the worst of all possible expressions, so bad that
it had never been printed in any newspaper. If they did imagine that,
they would be right; and so it was necessary for the Commonwealth to
resort to clubs and bullets.
XI
Alfred Baker Lewis, devoted young secretary of the Socialist Party,
was denouncing the Governor’s decision, when Michael J. Crowley came
pushing his way through the crowd, demanding to see his permit.
Burly Irish-Catholic Mike, known as “Mickey the Gunman” to the
striking policemen, and called even worse names by the booksellers
of Boston, whose boss and master he was. For among the many duties
of a superintendent of police in that pious city is to supervise the
books which the literati may purchase. In the course of the past two
years Mike had barred some seventy of the leading novels of the day,
practically everything which an intelligent man or woman would want to
read.
And so to-day; the public would be forbidden to hear every word that
could interest an intelligent citizen. The Salvation Army would
go on banging its drum, and the Holy Rollers would continue their
contortions; but protest against legalized murder would be met with
clubs, and if necessary with bullets.
“Let me see your permit,” commanded the superintendent of police; and
when the orator produced it, Mike announced, “This permit is canceled
and the meeting is forbidden.” When the young socialist attempted to
protest, “You are not going to argue this case in public,” said the
majestic Mike--just that and no more; he said it several times, so that
every citizen of Boston might feel the full weight of the civic insult.
“You are not going to argue this case in public!” Only in the council
chamber at the State House, before elderly academic autocrats who would
doctor the record when they got through, and keep the public from
knowing what blunders they had made!
“This meeting will disperse!” shouted Mike, to the sixteen thousand
persons crowded round him; and the blue-clad “cops” began their
onslaught--“for every lie a club or a bullet!”
“Come over to our tree! We have a permit!” shouted the communists;
so the crowd swarmed over there and Mike came also, and repeated his
performance, confiscating another permit. But the communist was not so
obedient as the socialist--he went on trying to speak, and was hauled
off the soap box and surrounded by policemen, and dragged off to the
waiting patrol-wagon. Three other persons they arrested--one of them
Edward Holton James, of Concord, nephew of the novelist who wrote like
a psychologist and of the psychologist who wrote like a novelist.
A persistent person, Mr. James; perhaps it came from living in Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s back-yard. He had stood up in Germany, during the
war, and said what he thought about the Kaiser. The Germans, not
understanding Concord, had decided that he must be insane, so they
had shipped him into Holland; whereupon he had promptly got himself
smuggled back in a load of merchandise, and stood up again and said
what he thought about the Kaiser, and spent three years in a fortress
for it.
Now he was so naïve as to think that he owned a share of the Common,
and had a right to speak there, and to refuse to be dragged off.
He resisted being dragged, and went so far as to slap one of the
officers--with the flat of his hand. They taught him his lesson,
regardless of his blue-blood and his money; when the “cop” got him
alone in the cell he gave him one on the side of the jaw, and Mr. James
“passed out,” as the saying is, and when he came to he had a cracked
jawbone, to keep him quiet for a while.
XII
Arthur Dehon Hill arguing before Judge Thayer in Dedham Court-house,
with the round white dome and portholes like an ocean liner. Silver
hair and rosy cheeks, his manner of subtle banter now replaced by
burning indignation, that a judge with such a record as Web’s, and
knowing in his heart such prejudice as Web’s, should be insisting
upon deciding a motion involving two human lives. The lawyer invited
the judge to consider how he would feel if the followers of Lenin had
seized the government of Massachusetts, and were trying him according
to the precedents he had set! He told Web to his face that he had
been unfit to try the case from the beginning; he cited in open court
what the Lowell commission had said about him--that in talking about
the case off the bench he had committed “a grave breach of official
decorum.” Could any man hear such words about himself, and not be
affected by them? Web’s answer was that the chief justice of the
Superior Court had instructed him to cut short his vacation and hear
this motion. “And I am here,” said Web, in a low voice. His face was
gray, his hands trembling, his eyes blinking fast. His court-house was
well guarded that day.
New evidence had been discovered. A young fellow by the name of Candido
di Bona had been standing on the street in South Braintree when the
bandit-car went by, and now made affidavit that neither Sacco nor
Vanzetti was in that car. This evidence was what the Lowell Commission
would have called “merely cumulative”; there were already thirty-one
persons who had made such statements, either at the trial or in later
affidavits, and Web Thayer knew of them all, and intended to pay no
more heed to the thirty-second than he had paid to the thirty-first.
He thought that he no longer had jurisdiction; that after sentence
had been passed, no judge of the Superior Court could entertain any
motion. To this the lawyer argued vehemently that nothing could deprive
accused men of an elemental right. “I believe that if there is new and
important evidence, the courts have the power to consider it, even
after sentence has been pronounced--even down to the time the men are
strapped in the electric chair. I do not believe the laws intended the
courts to regard these men as legally dead as soon as sentence was
pronounced.”
Arthur K. Reading, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, had been instructed by the Governor to follow Mr. Hill
in his peregrinations among the courts and make certain that he didn’t
get anything. Handsome, genial, and a good fellow, Mr. Reading was a
bitter foe of all Reds, and the aiders and abettors of Reds. Said he:
“I have just heard the most preposterous argument that I have ever
heard from an able lawyer.” He expressed his horror at “this attack on
the court for which I have the highest regard.” He proclaimed that,
“Ours is a government of laws.” Such reverence for laws and courts this
noble gentleman had--and even while he was orating, his pockets were
stuffed full of money, collected from various organizations which had
been warned by Arthur K. Reading as counsel that they were in danger of
prosecution by Arthur K. Reading as attorney general!
The “Decimo Club” was an ingenious organization which sold memberships
to persons who hoped to get rich quickly; but the only ones who did get
rich were the promoters of the club, and their legal counsel. A couple
of months ago they had secretly handed a check for twenty-five thousand
dollars to Mr. Reading, and immediately thereafter he had given to the
newspaper reporters an interview telling them that the Decimo Club was
all right. He had performed similar “legal services” for the “L.A.W.,”
an automobile stock-selling scheme with curiously involved features.
Altogether he had collected about ninety thousand dollars in such
“fees,” and within ten months of the time that he had demanded the life
of Sacco and Vanzetti, he was to be formally indicted by the House of
Representatives and driven from his high office in disgrace--the first
time that had happened in the history of the Commonwealth. So nemesis
waits for Red-hunters!
XIII
In the meantime Cornelia Thornwell had got into action
again--impossible to rest. Pleading with the Governor to grant a
respite--but the Governor would not give a hint of his intentions.
Calling up friends and relatives, nagging at them to “do
something”--when they had no idea what to do. “Henry, do you suppose
Fuller can really intend to let those boys die while proceedings are
pending before the courts?”
“I’m afraid he does, Mother”--this over the telephone.
“But what can be in his mind?”
“Well, Mother, it is costing a lot of money to keep this thing going.
Think of the military expenses! And then, it’s bad advertising; every
day it keeps up, things look worse for Fuller and Lowell, and naturally
they want it over with.”
“Do they think they can stop it by a murder?”
“I’m afraid they do, Mother--and what’s more, I’m afraid they are
right. You can’t keep the case alive when the men are dead.”
“Henry, you _must_ do something for me!”
“But what can I do? I have no pull with Fuller, I don’t even drive a
Packard car.” The great lawyer thought for a bit, and added: “Why don’t
you try a little social pressure? Get Deborah or Alice or both of them
to give him and his lady a dinner-party? I’ll come, if it will do any
good.”
Learn how the world is governed, Cornelia--now in your seventy-third
year of life! Once upon a time people did things like this to you, and
you were too gentle and trusting, too much of a “lady” to know it, or
to believe it when it was pointed out to you. But now do it yourself!
Seek out the weak spot in the armor of a motor-car salesman who has
forty million dollars, but no “social position,” and has a Catholic
wife, a cruel handicap in Massachusetts! Get busy at the telephone, and
put it up to your daughters, as hard as you know how--if they have one
particle of love for you in their hearts, if ever they had a particle
of love in their hearts, to spare you this dreadful anguish!
True it is that the motor-car salesman has made public attacks on
Rupert Alvin, calling him an arch-corruptionist and things like that;
but that is just politics, and social life is another thing altogether.
The motor-car salesman will doubtless know what is being done to him;
he is a business man, and does not give something for nothing, nor
expect to get something for nothing. To be received in one of the
greatest homes in New England, to put his feet under the table with
haughty and unapproachable Brahmins--that counts for nothing to him
personally, or so he pretends, being “bull-headed” and defiant; but he
has a wife, and children growing up to the age of marriage, and what
the women and children clamor for cannot be overlooked by the most
self-satisfied of self-made millionaires.
Cornelia had her way. Ladies do in Boston, when they are persistent,
and when they are old. The formal invitation was written by Deborah
Alvin, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and delivered by a chauffeur
at the Governor’s summer home, at Rye Beach in New Hampshire. A couple
of hours later an automobile arrived at the North Shore palace of the
Rupert Alvins, with a formally written acceptance. Deborah got busy,
and invited half a dozen members of the family, and intimate friends
who could be taken into the secret. Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge
came--another stage in her feminist revolt! Alice Thornwell Winters
came, dressed in pale lavender, the color which harmonized with her
aura; having lost a great deal of weight on a humming-bird diet,
she had taken up a new rôle, and was a picture of delicate and
spiritualized melancholy.
The Governor and his lady arrived, in the very latest model of Packard
limousine, custom-built, preceded by a car full of alert-looking men
with bulging hip-pockets, and followed by another carload. Several
posted themselves at the front door, others walked round and round the
house and peered into bushes and under porches. One, who looked and
acted like a guest, wandered about the downstairs rooms all through
the meal; the Commonwealth was taking no chances--especially in a home
where the mother-in-law was one of the most notorious Reds. These
precautions lent an extra thrill to the meal, but good form required
that no one should know anything about them.
The supersalesman sat at the right of his hostess; on the other
side was Alice, and the matter-of-fact and rosy gentleman had never
encountered anything so much like heaven. She told him about his aura,
which was news to him; Deborah told him about her orphan asylum, and
Rupert told about his chapel, and how a bishop from England had praised
the design of the apse. Never a word about the distressing news which
was on the front pages of all the papers! “Cura nulla medicabilis
arte” may have been all right for a poet two thousand years ago, but
the social arts of “old Boston” had mastered all human weakness.
Except that at the end of a delightful evening Deborah led her
distinguished guest to one side, and burdened him for a moment with the
story of how her old mother was suffering so that they feared for her
life; would she be presuming if she asked the Governor to reprieve the
two wretched men for a couple of weeks, until the hope of court action
could be tried out? The supersalesman replied with all the caution
of a skilled politician. It would not do for him to say outright,
because the final decision rested with his Council. But privately,
and in strictest confidence, he would assure Mrs. Alvin of his best
endeavors, and she might convey that information to her mother under
a seal of secrecy. When the ordeal was over, and Cornelia was free to
tell the story to Betty and Joe, she commented upon the way the world
is governed. Said Betty: “Don’t you know, Grannie, the real cause of
the world war--that King Edward of England was not sufficiently polite
to his nephew, Emperor William of Germany?”
XIV
On Monday evening Judge Webster Thayer handed down a decision, to the
effect that he had no jurisdiction to entertain any motion in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. By this ruling he claimed to have avoided passing
upon his own prejudice; but at the same time he said, in open court, “I
had no prejudice.” He said it many times.
On Tuesday morning he gave another decision, refusing the request for
a revocation and stay of sentence. He gave this out from his home in
Worcester, where two police officers watched by day and two by night,
and one followed behind the judge when he went walking with his dog.
In the toilet of a subway station in New York, a bomb had exploded,
wrecking the station and seriously injuring two persons. The friends
of law and order were certain that the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti
had set this bomb; while the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti were equally
certain that their worst enemies had done it. In the State House
in Boston a package had been found in one of the elevators; after
listening for clockwork inside, and hearing nothing, the police had
opened it with many precautions, and found two pounds of chocolate.
Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court declared that he had
no power to grant a motion for a new trial; it was a problem how to
bring the matter before the Full Court. Federal Judge Anderson declined
to intervene--in spite of “Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86.” In fact
he thought that decision worked the other way. A difficult matter
to make a science out of the law, when no one could determine what
it meant, and there were no angels to administer it! Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court said that he had no
authority, but pointed out that they were at liberty to try some judge
of the circuit court; however, the judges of the circuit court advised
trying the supreme court. It was as Bart had noted long ago--everybody
put the problem off on somebody else!
Hill and Field and Musmanno went racing about from one court to
another, and from one summer resort to another--wherever a judge might
be intercepted. Behind them chased Attorney General Reading, his
pockets full of money from the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.”; and behind
him one or more carloads of reporters, liberally provided with funds
by large-scale purveyors of sensation. Hill made another appeal to the
Governor for a stay; and the Governor announced that he would not grant
the request. That was Tuesday afternoon, and the execution was set for
Wednesday midnight.
“What does that mean, Deborah?”--it was Cornelia phoning to her
daughter, tormented with anxiety.
“I don’t know, Mother. I only know what he told me. He may have his
reasons. We ought not to talk about it over the telephone.” So there
was nothing to do but wait, and guess at the tortuous motives of a
supersalesman of automobiles, whose heart was set upon moving to the
White House.
Betty and Joe were absorbed in frantic efforts to awaken public
opinion. The respectable lawyers were out of favor now, and it was
permitted to make “propaganda.” The committee had issued a call for
a hundred thousand persons to come to Boston and voice the protest
of America against judicial murder. About two hundred came. For the
most part they only added to the confusion, because there was no one
to organize them or put them to work. No two had the same idea of what
should be done; and when they came to the committee, they found exactly
the same state of disagreement.
Many of the group from New York, especially the liberals and the
lawyers, thought that the crucial issue was the Department of Justice
files. They started a clamor: “Open the files!” Several newspapers
took it up. But this program met with strong opposition from the
Italian anarchists. Could there be things in these files which Italian
anarchists did not want to see upon the front pages of newspapers?
The liberals got so far as to induce the Department of Justice to say
that the files would be turned over to Governor Fuller or to President
Lowell, if either would ask for them; but these worthies took exactly
the same attitude as the anarchists, and for exactly the same reason.
There were more things in the class struggle than were dreamed of in
the philosophy of amiable liberals.
XV
One thing all sympathizers could do, and that was to get arrested. Over
at socialist headquarters in Essex Street was a little group which had
a program, and an organization to carry it out. A group of students
came there, and placards and sandwich signs were made, calling upon
Governor Fuller for justice. Young men and women sallied forth--and as
they emerged from the building, a squad of police fell upon them, and
took away the signs and tore them to pieces. So the job had to be done
all over; the signs were prepared secretly, and would-be paraders came
one by one to the place of demonstration, hiding their signs until they
were on the picket-line.
On Tuesday afternoon some thirty paraders made their appearance in
front of the State House, each wearing a placard with a Sacco-Vanzetti
argument upon it. For a while the police let them alone, and contented
themselves with keeping the crowd on the other side of the street.
On the Beacon Street front of the State House there is an iron
picket-fence, which curves in towards the main entrance, making a large
half moon; so there was a comfortable space for paraders, and a chance
for their sentiments to be legible. They walked in silence, keeping
in motion, paying no attention to any one: a form of demonstration
which had first been used on Broadway, New York, during the Colorado
coal strike, and had been taken up by the Boston suffragists at the
time of President Wilson’s visit, when Cornelia and Betty and Mrs.
Henderson and her daughter had gone to jail. The city had passed a
special ordinance to meet that form of insurrection; it provided
against “sauntering and loitering,” and the suffrage women had called
it “loitering for liberty.”
Too bad that so many of the demonstrators were foreigners, especially
Russians and Jews, who were disliked in Boston. Such names as
Berkowitch and Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck
and Shklar did not produce a good effect when read aloud over morning
codfish-balls and coffee. But when you call for martyrs you cannot
be fastidious, and your recruits will probably come from the martyr
races--especially the Jews, who discovered the idea. So Berkowitch and
Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck and Shklar, male
and female, walked up and down in front of the high stone building with
the golden dome, their faces pale and set with determination. With
them walked Alfred Baker Lewis representing the socialists, and Harry
J. Canter and Bertram Wolfe representing the communists, and Grace
Hutchins representing Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.
State House guards lined the picket-fence, and square-jawed, hard-faced
“plainclothesmen” slipped in and out among the crowd. The statue of
Daniel Webster surveyed the scene impassively; also the tall equestrian
figure of General Hooker, green with verdigris, and white with the
droppings of birds on top of his head. From the windows above, the
State House gang looked down, and cursed, or cracked their jokes;
the bootleggers and friends of bootleggers, the sellers of public
privileges, the boon companions of large scale plunderers, who had
millions to spend for immunity.
Over on the other side of Beacon Street was the Shaw monument,
glorifying a young Harvard aristocrat who had given his life to raise
Negro slaves to manhood. Here walked “cops” with clubs in their hands
and guns on their hips, wondering how long it would be before they
were turned loose on the “Bolshevikis”; also members of the American
Legion, stirring up the crowd, crying their hatred of the “goddam
Reds.” Few of the spectators needed any incitement; their heads were
stuffed with the contents of newspapers, and they were sure the
“Guinneys” were guilty, and should have been “burned” long ago.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the number of the paraders had grown
to a hundred and twenty-five, and the police decided that it had gone
far enough. Captain McDevitt appeared and read the riot act. Under
the law the “saunterers and loiterers” had seven minutes in which
to disperse. When they continued marching, the police surrounded
thirty-nine of them, and loaded them into patrol-wagons, and carted
them to the old Joy Street police station, followed by a crowd
shouting, “Beat them up! Hang them!” That was just words, of course;
Massachusetts is a law-abiding Commonwealth, fitting completely into
the formula of Lenin which Betty Alvin was so fond of quoting: “The
state is a monopoly of violence.”
XVI
The monopolists of violence were making their preparations for such a
show of their commodity as no city in America had ever witnessed in
time of peace. The old Charlestown prison was turned into an arsenal;
a cupola-crowned, octagon-shaped building of hand-cut stone, with
red-brick wings covered with ivy, its walls now had dozens of machine
guns mounted on top, and stores of ammunition, and sixteen searchlights
playing at night. Eight hundred policemen, carrying riot guns with
bayonets, took possession of the streets approaching the prison, and
roped them off, stopping all traffic over Prison Point Bridge, and on
Rutherford Avenue, a main thoroughfare, for half a mile. They were
posted on all the house-tops surrounding the prison. In front of the
gates were a hundred mounted Boston troopers, and a hundred of the
state constabulary riding the streets. Firemen were on hand with high
pressure hoses to repel mobs, and there was a plentiful store of tear
and gas bombs, gas masks and bullet-proof vests.
All day Wednesday the eight hundred and eighty-one inmates of the
prison went their usual round, with arms folded and lips shut. They
were not supposed to know what was going on; but rumor spreads in
penitentiaries, as fast as anywhere else. All the prisoners knew that
the death-sentence was to be carried out at midnight, unless the courts
or the Governor intervened. They knew that eighteen Western Union wires
had been run into the officers’ club of the prison, and that reporters
were swarming there to send out the news of the execution. At nine
o’clock the prison lights winked out one by one; but nobody went to
sleep.
In the death-house, in three narrow cells side by side, were the
condemned men; Sacco and Vanzetti and Madeiros, the Portuguese who had
managed to hitch his fate onto theirs. Sacco was on the fourth week of
a “hungry strike,” and Vanzetti was also fasting; they were haggard and
wasted, gray and grim. No one was permitted to see them, except their
lawyers and relatives. Vanzetti had a sister on her way from Italy; if
he were executed according to schedule she would not see him alive. The
mother and sister of Madeiros had come for a visit; also Rosina Sacco,
who spent her time trying to persuade her husband to sign some papers
for the lawyers. But he was more stubborn than ever before. “They have
had me nailed to the cross for seven years. Why should I keep it up?”
Rosina broke down and had to be carried away.
The newspapermen noted that Sacco and Vanzetti did not behave like
other condemned criminals; they did not chat with their keepers, nor
sit and play cards with them, shoving the cards under the barred doors
of the cells. They preferred to brood, staring at a little square patch
of sunlight which fell from the roof upon the floor, the only reminder
of the outside world. At night, when the searchlights played upon the
death-house, they saw nothing, nor did they hear the sound of horses’
hoofs. They were permitted to have their books and papers; despite
the fact that Vanzetti had written a statement in which he had called
Governor Fuller a “murderer.” They wrote farewell letters to the world:
still cherishing the “messianic delusion,” the idea that posterity
would be interested in their sufferings.
XVII
All that day the lawyers rushed about, and the Governor was busy
with his advisers. His Council was in session, also the seven
ex-attorney-generals of the Commonwealth, invited to advise him as to
the law on the matter of a respite. On the street outside, several
squads of pickets were being dragged off to jail, with more or less
violence. Those who had been arrested the day before were being denied
their hearings in police-court, and condemned to pay fines without
argument. Some refused, and went to jail; others paid, and came out to
join the “death march” again.
Marvelous copy for the newspapers, which printed everybody’s guesses
as to what was going to happen; every detail about the police
preparations, and diagrams of the death-house, and photographs of
the electric chair, and of the executioner--a gentleman who made a
specialty of sending two thousand volts of electricity into living
human bodies; he came from New York, it appeared, and was paid by the
piece. For this job he was to get seven hundred and fifty dollars, and
shocking as the statement may sound, he was overcharging the great
Commonwealth. The people of Massachusetts, having elected their best
business man to attend to their affairs, surely had a right to expect
the discounts customary to the trade; but here was New York State
getting its killings done by the same killer for only one hundred and
fifty per!
Young Musmanno went to see his clients, to get another paper signed.
They were glad to have some one to remind them that human affection
still survived in a world given up to business. Sacco refused to sign,
as usual; Vanzetti signed, hoping it would help both of them. He was
reading the Beards on “The Rise of American Civilization”--at the same
time that he watched its fall. He was not going to be able to finish
these large, expensive volumes, so he wanted to give them to the young
lawyer as a token of regard. But Musmanno couldn’t bear to take them,
because it would be admitting that Vanzetti was to die that night. They
had quite an argument about it; and several times Sacco would break in
with his realist humor: “Take the books, Musmanno! Take the books!”
Musmanno did not take the books, but sped away to make another plea to
the Governor. The prisoners began to sing; there was no law to prevent
that, they sang every international song they knew, in Italian and in
English.
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation;
A newer world’s in birth!
The rest of the prison heard no sound; but the searchlights flashed
into their cells and kept them awake, and cries would run down the
tiers of cells--hundreds of men shouting over and over: “Let them out!
Let them out!” There was no one to interfere with them, for the guards,
many of them, broke down and sobbed.
A singular adventure of Dorothy Parker, young poet from New York,
sophisticated and ironical, but not liking official murder. She knew a
newspaper reporter, and he got drunk, and volunteered to take her into
the prison with him. He got her past the police-lines, and then went
to get another drink, and never appeared again. So there was Dorothy,
wandering about, patting the noses of state troopers’ horses, surveying
the lines of guns, and testing Massachusetts prison discipline after
bed-time. She sat with the reporters, and gathered the news, and
then went to the telephone and called up Sacco-Vanzetti defense
headquarters, and was overheard by a horrified deputy-warden--a spy
of the enemy inside the defenses! A lovely story for bored reporters,
smoking cigarettes and playing cards in the officers’ club, and begging
for the tiniest item of news to put on the wires--starting with the
mystic letters, “SV,” and ending with the promise: “Will be add.”
What was the supersalesman doing? Said Betty, “It is his idea of drama,
to make publicity for himself!” But in this she was blinded by her
hatred of the man. The plain truth was, he had decided to have the
execution that night, and get it over with. But some of his advisers
said it was impossible, with matters as they stood before the courts.
Arthur Hill was arguing--a three hour argument before the Council. Up
to the last half hour the issue hung in the balance, and swayed, now
this way and now that.
Every preparation for death was made; the canvas cover was off the
electric chair, and the current tested--the three victims listening to
the sounds. They were dressed in their death-clothes--shirts with short
sleeves and trousers with short legs, leaving room for the electrodes.
But at ten-twenty the warden came to the reporters, his face wreathed
in smiles, announcing that he had been notified by the Governor, the
execution was “off” for that night. Wild excitement, and some joy, for
the burly warden did not like his job the least bit. The reporters
flashed the word “reprieve” to the farthest ends of the earth; but five
minutes later the warden came in again, his face a blank--terribly
sorry, he had further word from the Governor, the execution was “on”
again, and was to take place at midnight.
The official witnesses who had been selected, and the one reporter, the
Associated Press man, who had been favored above all other reporters,
made ready to enter the death-house. But again the warden burst in, at
twenty-seven minutes past eleven, almost in a state of collapse--he had
had another talk with the Governor, and the execution was “off” for the
next twelve days. The reporters leaped to the telegraph-keys--having
before their minds a terrible calamity. There are newspapers in the big
cities which make a practice of printing descriptions of things which
haven’t happened, but are due to happen according to schedule; there
would be New York papers having on their presses the news that the men
were dead. Suppose some of these copies were to get onto the streets!
The “false execution”--such was the name by which the friends of the
defense came to know that dreadful evening. They had sat in defense
headquarters, and in a church behind the State House which had been
mercifully opened to them, and waited for news, and pictured the worst.
Rosina Sacco had sat for three hours holding a watch in her hand; when
at last the news of the reprieve came in, she collapsed, and had to be
carried to the home of friends. In the little apartment on the north
side of Beacon Hill, Cornelia Thornwell was at the telephone, dizzy,
but able to hear the voice of Deborah: “I told you, Mother! You should
have believed me--he would not dare to disregard us.”