THE TRIUMPH
I
Even at that late hour there were men and women who could not make
up their minds to let Sacco and Vanzetti die. There were protestants
who would not cease marching. In Salem Street, in the North End of
Boston, a thousand or more Italians gathered, declaring their intention
to march to the Bunker Hill monument and hold a meeting during the
execution. Mike Crowley’s mounted men charged into the midst of them,
scattering them in every direction, crushing many. The same thing
happened in Thompson Square, and in the roped-off area near the prison.
Here seven men and women broke through the police lines, singing the
“International,” and lifting their printed protests, in defiance of all
that military might. “Hail, Sacco and Vanzetti! The élite of the world
salute you as heroes!” One of the seven was a war veteran, and when the
police fell upon him, “Oh, boy,” they cried, “wait till we get you in
jail!” A traitor to the army system, they would teach him a lesson he
would remember! They beat three men, one of them insensible, the others
nearly so.
Also there was another campaign before the Governor--at half-past ten
at night. William G. Thompson had come down from his vacation in New
Hampshire, and was making an appeal, based on the Governor’s fixed
prejudice concerning Vanzetti at the Plymouth trial. Over and over
again, for months, Fuller had been talking about the fact that Vanzetti
had not taken the stand in his own behalf. That very morning he had
voiced dark rumors about Vahey and Graham, the lawyers who had defended
Vanzetti at Plymouth; if they were not bound by the code which forbids
lawyers to betray a client, they could tell dreadful things about
Vanzetti.
The substance of this proposition had been telephoned to William G.
Thompson, up in New Hampshire, and he had motored to Boston, and gone
to see Vanzetti early in the evening--a long conference, the substance
of which he later published in the _Atlantic Monthly_, He asked if
Vanzetti would be willing to permit Vahey to tell the truth about the
case, and his dealings with his clients. The answer was Vanzetti’s
usual charge, as to how his case had been conducted, which he was
certain had cost him his life. Now the lawyer came to see Governor
Fuller, bringing Vanzetti’s message, that he was willing for Vahey
to say anything he knew, provided that the interview took place in
the presence of Thompson, or some other friend in whom Vanzetti had
confidence. So now the way was open to a “show-down,” and would the
Governor follow his own suggestion? Surely fair play required that!
The answer of Fuller was to make no answer--a trick which public
personages have to learn. Silence! Out there on the other side of the
Charles River was a miniature army on duty, and a prison staff about
to put those wops out of the world, so that Fuller and his class could
“sleep better.” All traffic stopped over main highways between the two
cities; thousands of persons, living near the prison, illegally shut
up in their homes for the night; a million dollars invested by Boston
merchants and manufacturers in riot and bomb insurance; the newspaper
wires run into the prison, the witnesses summoned, the traveling
expenses of the executioner incurred for the second time--and all that
trouble and expense to be brought to nought, while the Governor carried
on a debate with a bunch of “meddlesome Matties” in secret sympathy
with terrorists! In the formula which had been current in the sporting
world when “Allie” Fuller was a bicycle-racer: “Not on your tin-type!”
II
At a quarter before midnight William G. Thompson came out from the
Governor’s chamber, and to the waiting reporters expressed his solemn
conviction that innocent men were about to be executed. A strange
event--a great lawyer breaking the rule of his lifetime, defying Boston
legal proprieties and “trying the case in the newspapers!” He would
give a long interview, defending his clients, and telling the Vahey
episode, and much of what Vanzetti had said to him in prison.
Meantime--even at that hour--one more protest! Francis Fisher Kane,
former U. S. Attorney for Pennsylvania, had been waiting for two hours
to see the Governor to make one last appeal concerning the Department
of Justice files. He persuaded the doorman to take in his card, and the
Governor granted five minutes. Mr. Kane presented a fact which had just
come to his knowledge; President Lowell had stated to a friend that the
files were of no significance, and could not have affected the decision
of his Commission. Mr. Kane now strove to make this matter clear to the
Governor. The files would show that the Department of Justice had been
watching Sacco and Vanzetti by means of “informers,” considering them
as dangerous anarchists. Mr. Kane himself knew exactly what that meant,
having been a Federal prosecutor, in charge of the watching of certain
anarchists; he had resigned his position, in protest against the things
he saw being done during the “Red raids.” He could certify that Sacco
and Vanzetti had had good reason to be afraid for their lives on the
night of their arrest; and thus that famous “consciousness of guilt”
theory of Judge Thayer was knocked out. The arrested men had a kind of
guilt to be conscious of, entirely different from that of the South
Braintree crime!
So the lawyer argued; and it was like water falling upon a granite
stone. For seven years the authorities of Massachusetts had had these
facts before them, and had resolutely shut their eyes; the reason being
that, in their secret hearts, they desired the death of anarchists
quite as ardently as the death of bandits.
The telephone ringing; the group of New York lawyers who had set out
to try to reach Williamstown by motor-car, but realized that it was
too late. John Finerty on the wire, to beg the Governor, in the name
of common decency, to put off the execution for just a couple of
hours, until they could reach Judge Anderson and see if he would act
upon their appeal. The Governor’s answer was that Mr. Finerty should
communicate with Attorney-General Reading, who was in charge of legal
matters that night. Mr. Finerty called Mr. Reading’s office and learned
that Mr. Reading had gone to the Governor’s office about the matter.
He called the Governor’s office and learned that Mr. Reading had gone
back to his own office. He called Mr. Reading’s office and learned
that Mr. Reading had not arrived. Astonishing agility on the part of
a high official, in spite of his pockets being stuffed with the money
of the Decimo Club and the “L. A. W.” and other corporations which
feared trouble from the legal department of the great Commonwealth! Mr.
Finerty was not able to hear Mr. Reading’s voice.
The weary Governor rose from his desk, and put on his hat. It had been
a strain; his face was drawn with exhaustion--impossible to conceal
it now. “No statement, boys,” to the newspaper men. His guards closed
about him, and he went down to his Packard car, under the Mt. Vernon
Street arch of the State House, closed all that day to traffic. The
guards saluted, they fell back and dropped the ropes; a police-car
in front, another in the rear, with riot-guns ready for instant
action--the little procession rolled out into the night, on its way to
the summer home in New Hampshire.
III
Cornelia, returned to her apartment, found Betty waiting. So she sent
off her daughters and son-in-law. “I am perfectly all right now. That
visit was what I needed. No use to keep you up. Thanks for what you
did, it made everything all right.” She lay on the bed, and told Betty
about her visit, and every word that had been spoken. Betty told about
the meeting she had attended, and how the crowds were behaving. It was
like war time, tens of thousands of people in front of the bulletin
boards; and when some item of bad news came, you would hear a moan, a
sob of mass-agony. Apparently the public was beginning to realize--at
the last moment--too late!
“I am going to be able to stand it, Betty. I have got to stand it, for
Bart’s sake.” Betty was glad to hear it; she was prepared to carry her
own burden, but no more. “Yes, yes, it’s all right,” the old woman went
on. “It is what Bart and Nick wanted.” But even as she said it, there
was a trembling at the lips, and a look of terror in her eyes.
An hour and more still to be passed. Betty began hastily to tell the
news. She had stopped at headquarters: she told who was there, but
dodged away from describing the weeping and anguish. Powers Hapgood
had been missing for hours, and word had just come that he was shut up
in “Psychopathic”; Joe Randall had hurried off to fetch Dr. Myerson,
to get Powers out. Creighton Hill had made a trip to Maine, with two
clergymen, to get another clergyman to make an affidavit concerning
Thayer’s prejudice. But Fuller wouldn’t pay any attention to it, of
course.
Cornelia was only half hearing. “Betty, do you suppose the Governor can
be meaning to put it off again?”
“I don’t know, Grannie. How can you tell, with that beast?” Never if
they lived a thousand years would the women of the defense forgive
him for the night of anguish he had caused them, by withholding the
reprieve until twenty minutes before the time for the execution.
Gossip wouldn’t do, Betty realized; she must tap the deeper layers
of the human soul. “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity,” so the
evangelists tell us; now Betty Alvin, hard and grim little realist,
must become a prophet and a saint, like Bart! She must point out that
stone walls do not a prison make, and how they that kill the body
only glorify the soul. She must make real to both her grandmother
and herself what this night’s events would mean to the future; a
consecration to the radical movement, a purifying of the faith of all
of them, a spiritual rebirth for Boston. “Oh, Betty, is it really so?
Won’t they forget all about it, and go back to their radios and their
jazz?”
“Some will, Grannie; but some of us aren’t going to forget this long
fight.”
“Seven years!” Cornelia whispered. “Seven years!”
Betty answered that it had taken those years to make the case; to get
public attention centered on it, to get the great ones of Boston to
notice two wops. “Don’t you see what it’s for, Grannie--to dramatize
the class struggle! To make it so plain that every child can see it!
To make it into a formula, that you can say in three words, and have
everybody understand it--everywhere, all over the world, for all future
time! ‘Sacco and Vanzetti!’ And right here in our great and prosperous
America, that is making so many automobiles and bathtubs and books of
etiquette! Right here in Boston, that is so moral! Don’t you see how
important it is to have the capitalist class electrocute its own lies?”
“Betty! Betty! When will men stop killing?”
“When we end exploitation, Grannie dear; and Bart and Nick are doing
the job! Don’t you see the glory of this case--it kills off the
liberals! Before this, it was possible to argue that injustice was
an accident, just an oversight--in a country that was so busy making
automobiles and bathtubs and books of etiquette! But now here’s a
test--we settle the question forever! We take our very best--not merely
cheap politicians, but our great ones! Our biggest business man! Our
most cultured university president! Our supreme court judges--even the
liberal ones! We prove them all alike--they all know what flag they
fight under, who serves out their rations! They all take their places
in the ranks, with every button in position, and all of them washed
behind the ears! They all obey the great capitalist drill-sergeant, and
not a man deserts to the enemy--not one single man!”
A quarter to twelve. “Betty, if they were going to put it off, they’d
have had to say so by now.”
“Yes, blessed dear, I’m afraid so.”
“And somebody would have let us know!”
“Yes, surely they would.”
“They’ll let us know when it’s over?”
“Joe promised he’d phone at once.” Then, in desperation: “Grannie, did
you hear about the necklace which Bart gave to Mr. Thompson? He took
the ten dollars you sent him, and bought some things the prisoners had
made, and gave Mr. Thompson a necklace of beads for his wife, and Mr.
Thompson broke down and cried. They say he can’t talk about it without
crying. It’ll ruin him as a lawyer.”
“Bart and Nick were right about it all along,” said Cornelia. “They
knew more about Boston than we did.”
“That is something that touched Mr. Thompson. Nick had insisted he’d
never get anywhere with the courts, and to-day Mr. Thompson thought
that Nick would remind him of it. But Nick didn’t say a word; he knew
how much it would hurt.”
Twelve o’clock. Cornelia, white-faced, her hands clasped together, and
her voice a faint whimper. “Betty, they must be in the death-chamber
now.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Remember what you promised Bart!”
“I know, I know--but I wonder--how long does it take?”
“Not very long, dear, they make it quick, they are as polite as Fuller.”
But somehow that wasn’t the right thing to say. Betty caught the poor
trembling hands, and began to whisper: “Grannie, dear, don’t let
yourself go! We all need our strength, we have a whole world to change.”
“All right, I won’t, I won’t! How long does--how long do they keep the
current on?”
“I don’t know, two or three minutes. But the victims don’t know it, so
what’s the use thinking about such things!”
“They must be doing it now! Oh, Betty--tell me something to think
about!”
“They are brave men, Grannie. They have lived the life they wanted to
live, and they don’t want us crying over them. Think of all the people
who get killed--so many in needless ways--that we can put a stop to
when we have learned what Bart and Nick have to teach us.” So Betty,
rushing on, a little stump-speech--but all in vain. She had to keep
squeezing the poor frail hands, and saying over and over again the
simple elemental idea, that Bart had forbidden Cornelia to grieve, and
she had promised not to. After all, Bart’s life was his own, and if he
chose to become one of the world’s great martyrs, who had a right to
object?
IV
Cornelia could be got to listen to that, to sit staring, like a
hypnotized rabbit. The trouble was that the clock on the mantel-piece
became hypnotized, too, and the hands refused to move; all time stood
still, there was no way to get it past. The world hung suspended in
a void of suffering--that very hell which Father Murphy, the prison
chaplain, had been telling about, where pain endured forever.
Some magic spell had been woven over the minds and souls of tens of
thousands, perhaps millions of persons, scattered over every part of
the earth; never had there been such a phenomenon since the world
began. They sat in rooms and stared at each other, they stood in front
of bulletin boards and clenched their hands, or maybe bit their
finger-nails; they went walking blindly about the streets, not knowing
where. In whatever part of the world they might be--in Boston or Los
Angeles, Buenos Ayres or Paris or Tokio--they had figured the time, and
were saying the same words as Cornelia Thornwell: “They must be doing
it now! They must have them in the chair! How long does the current
take?” And one and all they noticed that extraordinary phenomenon--time
stood still, minutes refused to pass as they normally should.
The telephone ringing; Betty had to let go of her grandmother’s hands
to take the receiver. Cornelia watched her face, reading the fates
there. No need to hear a word; Cornelia knew it was Joe, and he was
saying, “It’s all over.” “Yes, sweetheart,” said Betty, in a voice as
even as if she were accepting an invitation for lunch. “Yes, we’re
all right. Grannie went over and had a talk with them both, and she’s
feeling stronger. But you’d better come home right away--yes, dear, we
might need you. Please do.” She hung up quickly, so that Joe might not
hear the dreadful burst of anguish from the poor old woman on the bed.
Betty dug under the wasted body, and got hold of the hands, and made
the agonized soul sit up and look at her. “Grannie, listen to me now!
You don’t realize--it’s all over! Stop and think what that means--Bart
and Nick can’t suffer any more! Nobody can punish them, nobody can
torture them--ever again! They aren’t in jail! They are free!”
So on and on, until the idea did actually penetrate Cornelia’s mind.
The sobbing ceased, and she sat staring ahead of her, as if at an
apparition in the room. “It is really so! They can’t do any more to
them!”
“Grannie, blessed dear, it is what Nick has been saying all along, and
we never had sense enough to realize it! Their job is done, and they
are all right!”
V
At ten o’clock the chief electrician and his assistant had tested
the death chair and pronounced everything in order. Then came the
executioner, to make his inspection. Elliot was this gentleman’s name;
he preferred a retired life, on account of anarchist bombs, but the
clamor of newspapers had brought him into the limelight; they published
his picture, and a list of the human beings he had killed. The “false
execution” of twelve days ago had compelled him to make a journey for
nothing; very annoying, and he was hoping that now there would be no
hitch, he would get his seven hundred and fifty dollars.
Father Murphy came to the death cells, to make his last offer of
eternal life. Absolutely without charge, and merely by a few passes of
the hands and the speaking of a few words, he was willing to deliver
these three men from the otherwise certain fate of perpetual roasting
upon a brimstone and sulphur fire. Nearly three hundred years ago
the philosopher Pascal had presented an unanswerable argument on the
subject: the procedure would do you great good if it were valid, and
no harm if it were not valid. But Vanzetti answered that it would do
harm to those whom he left on earth, to be more tightly riveted in
the chains of superstition. So, a few minutes before midnight, Father
Murphy went to the officers’ club of the prison and remarked to the
newspapermen, “There seems to be nothing for me to do, so I am going
home.”
That clubroom was like the “pit” in the stock exchange, with more
than a hundred reporters scrambling for every scrap of news. Many
telephones were installed, and eighteen telegraphers sat at eighteen
machines, to feed the curiosity of a ravenous world. The service
included direct cable connections with all the other five continents.
The representative of the Associated Press had been honored by an
invitation to witness the execution, and was pledged to furnish the
details to his colleagues.
There were, according to law, a number of official witnesses, whose
duty it was to certify to the Governor that his orders had been
carried out. They were in readiness, and the warden now led them to
the death-house. Chairs were lined against the wall of the execution
chamber, facing the electric chair, and the worthies took their seats.
The big warden, with plump round face and little black mustache and
narrow slits for eyes; a well-known Boston surgeon; the physician of
the prison; the surgeon general of the national guard, who looked
like a college professor; the medical examiner of Suffolk County, who
looked like a romantic poet with tousled hair; the sheriff of Norfolk
County, a bald-headed, stern-faced old Puritan, who had had Sacco in
charge for seven years, and Vanzetti off and on, at great expense to
his office--he was one of those who had expressed their sentiment
by piling up the desk of Judge Thayer with flowers, on the day that
learned jurist delivered his charge to the Dedham jury, and explained
the nobility of loyalty.
There was a telephone against the wall of the execution chamber, and
the representative of the Associated Press took his stand by it; the
wire ran to the warden’s office, and from there a telegraph operator
would relay every word to the crowd of reporters. In this way they
would learn when each man entered the death chamber, when the current
was turned on, and when the death was officially announced. Later the
“A.P. man” would go over to the officers’ club and give the details.
The executioner stood behind a screen in one corner, to the left of
the death chair; he could look over the screen, and see when it was
time for him to earn his money. Two guards stood by the door leading
to the cell corridor, and when the warden signaled that all was ready,
they stepped back to the first cell, and unlocked the door. Madeiros
lay asleep--not setting much value upon his last moments. The guards
awakened him, stood him on his feet, and led him, half dazed, into the
execution chamber, closing the door behind them, out of kindness for
the occupants of the other two cells.
The victim had on short gray trousers, with a slit cut up each leg,
and a blue shirt with short sleeves, made especially for the occasion.
He was seated in the chair, and as quickly as possible the deputy
warden and a guard buckled the straps which would hold his hands and
feet immovable. The electrodes, from which the current was to enter
the body, were fastened, one to each leg, and a third, the headpiece,
covering the entire top of the head; they contained wet sponges, to
afford perfect transmission.
They tied a bandage over the victim’s eyes, and then stepped back; all
was ready. It was the warden’s part to signal with his hand to the
executioner, who would then move a switch. Since this did the actual
killing, the theory was that the executioner alone was responsible, and
for carrying this heavy responsibility the Commonwealth paid him the
sum of two hundred and fifty dollars for each of three motions of the
hand--plus traveling expenses from his retreat in New York.
He made the first motion, and there was a whir of the current, and
the body of Madeiros gave a sudden leap, which would have jerked it
from the chair if it had not been that the straps were heavy. Human
flesh became of the rigidity of steel, and stayed that way for several
minutes, with a current of nineteen hundred volts passing through it. A
ghastly odor of burning hair spread through the death chamber.
The current was turned off, the body sank back limp into the chair,
and the warden signed to the medical examiners, who stepped forward
with their stethoscopes. At nine minutes and thirty-five seconds past
midnight they pronounced the Wrentham bank robber dead, and the body
was lifted from the chair and carried to one of three newly painted
slabs hidden behind a screen in the death chamber. Nothing could exceed
the sense of propriety of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or
the decency with which it prepared for the elimination of its enemies.
VI
The door leading to the cells was opened again, and the two guards went
in to the second cell. Nicola Sacco was not asleep, but waiting, to do
his last duty as a revolutionist. He walked out between the guards;
he entered the execution chamber, and looked about him at the row of
solemn witnesses, the deputies, the chair, and the screen with the face
peering over it. His own face was white and haggard, his lips set, his
whole expression that of defiance. He walked directly to the chair and
sat down; then, as the guards began to adjust the straps, he lifted
himself slightly, raised his voice, and said, in what came as a shout
in that still brick-walled chamber of death: “Viva l’anarchia!”
(“You see!” said all Massachusetts, when they read about it with their
morning coffee and codfish balls. “We told you so! We knew it all
along!”)
The guards paid no attention to any words. They went on with swift
fingers, as if they feared that some one might come to stop them at
the last moment. When they were through, and stepped back, Sacco opened
his lips again, and the warden withheld the signal. “Farewell, my wife
and children and all my friends!” Then, as the warden was in the act of
lifting his hand: “Good evening, gentlemen. Farewell, Mother.”
The cue was given, and the executioner moved the switch, and the body
leaped so that it was like a blow against the straps. Twenty-one
hundred volts was the executioner’s estimate of what it would take to
rid Massachusetts of this wiry peasant; the amperage was from seven to
nine, and it was nineteen minutes and two seconds after midnight when
the medical examiners pronounced the duty done. The body of Nicola
Sacco was lifted from the chair, and carried behind the screen and laid
upon the second slab.
Then for the third and last time the door into the cell corridor was
opened, and the guards entered. Bartolomeo Vanzetti had sat upon his
cot alone, knowing what was happening in the adjoining chamber, but it
had not shaken his nerve; he had had seven years in which to work out
his system of self-discipline. “This is our career and our triumph.” He
rose from his cot, and walked with firm steps, the guards holding him,
one by each arm. When they entered the execution chamber, the guards
released him, and he looked at them--men whom he had known for a long
time, and whom he had taught to respect him, no longer to call him a
wop. They were poor fellows, who maybe had wives and children to keep,
and could not help what they were doing; so he turned to them first, as
became a proletarian martyr. “Good-by,” he said to each, and held out
his hand to each in turn, and shook their hands firmly.
Then he turned to Deputy Warden Hogsett, and took both his hands and
wrung them. “Good-by, I thank you for your courtesy to me.” And then
to the warden, a big towering figure. Vanzetti was quiet and at ease,
as if he were welcoming visitors to his home. “Warden, I want to thank
you for all that you have done for me.” He held out his hand, and the
warden took it.
(“Jesus!” he said, to one of the reporters afterwards. “He shook my
hand, and then I had to raise it to give the signal!”)
Vanzetti walked to the chair and sat down. Then he spoke--words which
he had made the subject of much thought. “I wish to tell you that I am
innocent and never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank
you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime,
not only of this one, but of all. I am an innocent man.”
The guards, well trained, went on with their work, paying no attention
to eloquence. The electrodes were adjusted, the straps made fast. As a
guard started to apply the bandage to Vanzetti’s eyes, he spoke again;
it was the question which Cornelia had asked him, and to which he had
promised an answer. He gave it with all the world for an audience. “I
wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
The guards stepped back, and the warden gave the signal; the
executioner moved the switch, and the body of Bartolomeo Vanzetti
leaped as the others had done. Nineteen hundred and fifty volts were
estimated to be sufficient for this less robust person, a dreamer and
a man of words rather than of action. Many, many words he had both
spoken and written, but now no more. The current was turned off, and
the medical men made their examination, and at twenty-six minutes and
fifty-five seconds past midnight they pronounced that the last spark
of anarchism had been extinguished from the august Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. The warden had a solemn formula to recite, but his voice
almost failed him, and not all the witnesses heard the words: “Under
the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been
legally carried out.”
The third body was laid on the slab, and the doors of the execution
chamber were opened--it had grown very hot, with the many volts of
electricity and the tense emotions of martyrs. Also, the odor of burned
hair made one ill; the night breeze was very welcome. The guards and
witnesses went outside, and wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and
from the backs of their wilted collars. “Christ!” said the deputy
warden. “Did you hear what he said? He forgave me! Now what do you make
of that?”
VII
The representative of the Associated Press hastened to the officers’
club. Not often does one man carry a message to the whole world. He
entered the room with the hundred ravening reporters, and had to mount
a chair so that all might have an equal chance to hear. “No features,”
he said. “Entirely colorless.” The proper professional air; if his
“assignment” had been Mount Calvary, he would have said the same. If
Jesus had raised a row at the last moment--if he had tried to escape,
and had knocked down the captain of the centurions--that would have
been “hot news.” Or if he had cursed God, instead of merely asking
why God had forsaken him. Obvious enough that God would not pay any
attention to the leader of a Jewish rabble, a common workingman, born
in a stable in the flea-infested village of Bethlehem!
So likewise this death of Sacco and Vanzetti--“no features.” No,
they hadn’t confessed--except that Sacco had confessed to being an
anarchist. He had cried: “Viva l’anarchia!” (“How the hell do you spell
it? Has it got a ‘k’?”). No one had collapsed, or made what you would
call a scene. Sacco’s complexion had been white, you might almost say
green. (“The way Mary Splaine described him--I remember at the Dedham
trial.”) Vanzetti had shaken hands with everybody, very politely.
(“Anarchist propaganda! A grandstand play!”) He had said--the bored
correspondent consulted his bunch of papers, on which he had jotted
down a few words--he said that he forgave everybody--no, it was “some
people.” (“The little infant Jesus! Ain’t they lambs, these Reds?”)
The room was gray with tobacco smoke, an inferno of heat--the windows
having been boarded up, for fear somebody might “throw something in.”
The clamor was deafening--the clicking of eighteen telegraph keys,
and the voices of men shouting over the telephones, each trying to
hear himself above the uproar--that competition which is the life of
capitalism. Men standing against the wall scribbling, or writing on
their knees, each hoping to file his words the first. The three big
press associations would take care of the main outlines of the news for
all the papers of the country; they had already sent three “flashes”
on each execution; now they would follow with details. But a hundred
papers had sent special correspondents, and these pleaded for “human
interest stuff,” hounding those who had witnessed the events.
The warden had gone to his office; he was gray, and the perspiration
could not be kept from his forehead, nor the trembling from his whole
body. He invited his deputy to have a drink with him, and opened his
cupboard for the purpose; but there entered Mike Crowley with the
police commissioner, a blue-blood, appointed by the Governor. The
warden didn’t think it quite right for that high-up personage to see
him indulging his appetite at this moment, so he hastily shut the
cupboard door again. He had to sit down in a chair. The deputy kept
saying: “He shook both my hands! And he forgave me! I never saw such a
thing! I couldn’t conceive of it!”
The news was spread by a thousand telegraph wires, and in a
hundred cities great crowds learned it from the bulletin boards of
newspapers; for the most part in silence, but sometimes with groans
and sobs. The Boston _Evening Transcript_ had kept its broadcasting
station open--radio WBET--entertaining the listeners with music and
miscellaneous news all evening. The comfortable population of New
England sat in their easy chairs and absorbed the easy entertainment:
the WBET Troupers in “Not Quite Such a Goose,” a comedy in one act;
Boots and His Nighthawks, dance music; the Klassay Boys; the Handy
Instrumental Trio; Doc Wassermann’s Orchestra; and the Correct Time.
In the news that day all kinds of thrills: Ed Farrell’s hitting had
been a large factor as the Braves won three straight from the Cubs; two
school boys were leading the field in the first half of the qualifying
round for the amateur golf title; a girl tennis queen had won an
impressive victory in New York, and the French Davis cup team had
arrived in Boston. More serious items: St. Mark’s Church had benefited
by the will of a millionaire manufacturer of extracts; eight hundred
Catholic teachers from a hundred and thirty-five parochial schools
were in convention; the city council had voted three hundred thousand
dollars for a golf links; the wife of a moving picture favorite had
obtained a divorce from her husband, after charging him eight hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for his freedom. The flappers of Boston
listened, and reflected: “If I could get to marry somebody like that, I
could live on the alimony the rest of my life.” Radio central station
WBET, the Boston _Evening Transcript_: “The juice was turned off,
and Vanzetti was officially pronounced dead at twelve, twenty-six,
fifty-five. The orchestra will now play, ‘The End of a Perfect Day.’”
VIII
In every great capital of the world there were mass meetings and
protests that night. In London a mob marched upon Buckingham Palace,
and had to be ridden down by mounted men--quite as if it were Boston
Common. In Berlin there were a score of meetings, ending with parades.
In Geneva the demonstrants raided the American embassy, and when
clubbed away, broke the windows of the League of Nations Palace. Even
in far-off Tokio the American ambassador had to receive a deputation of
labor leaders, and explain that he had no control over executions in
Massachusetts.
In Paris there had been a general strike, and on the night of the
execution there were street demonstrations, with mobs shouting curses
at Americans whenever they met them--which was frequently. An American
playwright and his wife asked for police protection, and when the
official learned that they knew German, he advised them to speak it for
a while. An odd freak of history--only ten years since the battle of
the Argonne, and here was a man who had taken part in it, being told to
speak the language of the Boche!
It was dawn when the workers of Europe got the news, and they went to
their tasks with hearts blazing. To them it was a personal matter,
for they had friends in America, and knew the attitude of native New
England to its foreign workers. There were guards before all American
embassies and consulates, and few escaped without broken windows.
In London forty persons were injured in the rioting; in Australia
eighteen hundred were discharged for taking part in a strike; in South
Africa the American flag was burned on the steps of the town hall of
Johannesburg.
On the evening of the 23rd in Paris huge masses of workers were
driven about the streets by the police. They would scatter, and
then reassemble, wherever Americans were to be met. They raided the
cabarets of Montmartre, and showered the patrons with broken glass. The
“Moulin Rouge,” shrine of tourist culture, was demolished, and when
the panic-stricken patrons got outside, they found their automobiles
overturned and the tires cut. Unkind and inexplicable it seemed to
amiable globe-trotters, who had sent over their boys and won the war
for the French, and now, finding that the French could not pay their
debts, were permitting them to work it off by entertaining several
hundred thousand bond-holders every summer. Large round gentlemen in
golf-pants, with horn-rimmed glasses and rosy cheeks, ate the best food
in the country, and drank the best wines, and had the best dress-makers
to decorate their bouncing jolly wives, or the lean tall ones who took
culture seriously. They rode about in rows on large motorbuses, with
guide-books in hand, admiring indiscriminately; they scattered money to
right and left, paying double prices, determined to have the best of
everything in the world.
The wage-slaves of French factories, half starved for generations,
read in their socialist and communist papers of the death of Sacco
and Vanzetti; and in the same issue they read how the wife of an
American millionaire was introducing a new fashion in carved emeralds
from India, of which jewelers in the rue de la Paix had a few rare
specimens. The Chicago harvesting-machine queen had paid approximately
eighteen million francs--the life-time earnings of several hundred
French workingmen--for a necklace containing eighty-nine such jewels,
minutely carved in relief to represent events in Hindu history. She had
been the sensation at Biarritz when she appeared on Baron Fascini’s
yacht, wearing this necklace as the sole ornament on her newest Oxford
bags pajamas suit of natural colored pongee, and a royal blue jacket
with gold buttons. Such munificence made prosperity for all Paris, and
kept many thousands of workers alive; yet they refused to love their
benefactors, but called them dirty names, and threw stones through the
windows of the cafés which exhibited the depravities of Paris to the
Puritan trade.
The wisest of Frenchmen had written a letter to Governor Fuller. “I say
to you, beware of making martyrs. This is the unforgivable crime that
nothing can wipe out and that weighs on generation after generation.”
But alas, the name of Anatole France meant nothing to a salesman of
motor-cars who read the _Saturday Evening Post_; that letter had
doubtless been burned in the furnaces, along with all the others. And
now Massachusetts had made her martyrs, and stood upon her pedestal of
self-righteousness. The more the world hated her, the more proud she
would be, to be right while everybody else was wrong. “Massachusetts,
there she is!” said Daniel Webster, darling of the “golden mob.”
“Behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world
knows it by heart. The past at least is secure.” So the golden ones
would continue to orate, while the names of her two martyrs swelled to
a battle-cry of the disinherited of the earth. Until that day when the
workers of Europe began to take Joe Randall’s advice and repudiate the
debts!
IX
The corpses were in a mortuary, still held by the authorities. Then,
horror of horrors, the friends of the defense learned that the bodies
were being mutilated, the hearts and brains of both men were to be
turned over to a medical school--of all places, Harvard University! It
was a custom with the bodies of executed men, not a special indignity
planned for these two--so the newspapers explained. Did the authorities
have a right to do it? Or did they just do it? Nobody seemed to know.
To the friends of the two martyrs it was the final insult--they could
not have been more outraged if they had seen the august president of
Harvard thumbing his nose at them.
“What do they want with their hearts and brains?” cried Cornelia; and
Betty, the ferocious, explained matters. Harvard had so many millions
upon millions of endowments, and had not succeeded in producing a great
man for at least a generation. So many hundreds of professors, of every
kind of subject on earth, and they couldn’t teach anything worth while!
Now they wanted the hearts and brains of two wops, to see if they could
find out the secret of greatness. If they studied Nick’s heart, they
might learn about courage; from Bart’s they might find a clew to social
idealism, and the chemical constituents of faith. This fancy gave
great joy to Betty, who went on to picture the medicos peering through
microscopes, and making analyses in test-tubes, to find out the ways of
genius. Mr. Lowell studying blood-counts, to learn how to put a little
human interest into a speech or an essay! The heads of the English
department making drawings of the cells in Vanzetti’s cortex, to find
out how a wop had become a great master of English prose!
The mutilated bodies were turned over to the relatives at last.
Thousands of persons wanted to view them, and pay their last tribute;
but the proprietors of the building in which the defense had two dingy
rooms refused to permit it to happen there; to make sure, they nailed a
joist up and down through the middle of the entrance to their building,
which they figured would keep out coffins! So arrangements were made
with an Italian undertaker on Hanover Street; and the moment it was
known that the bodies were there, ten thousand persons gathered, and
the police had to rope off the entire block, and let in only a few at a
time.
Also they had to start clubbing and jailing again. For Mary Donovan
came with another placard, containing those words which three or four
weeks ago she had nailed to one of the elm trees of the Common: “Did
you see what I did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” She
set that placard in front of the two coffins, while the newspaper
photographers prepared to take pictures of it. And of course the police
wouldn’t permit that; had they not abolished free speech in Boston
in order to prevent those words from being put before the public? A
policeman grabbed Mary’s placard, and she, being Irish like himself,
was not above fighting for her own. Other “cops” came running, and
dragged Mary off to jail; and then of course they had to club the
crowds, to keep them from crying “Shame!”
The friends of the defense desired to have a parade to the crematory
where the bodies were to be burned. Many persons desired to go, and why
should they not walk? So began negotiations with officials of this city
of terror, for the right to walk eight miles to a crematory. The first
stipulation was that the walkers must go by the most direct route,
which would take them through obscure streets for the most part, and
past no precious public buildings. The second stipulation was that the
caskets must be carried in a hearse, and not upon the shoulders of men.
The third was that no signs or banners should be borne. No word about
“anarchistic ----”!
“Back to Normalcy,” said the Boston _Herald_; and put all this news
on an inside page. The _Post_ discussed such topics as “The Sunless
Summer” and “Vegetarians and Shoes.” The chiefs of the moving picture
industry, whose orgy with drunken prostitutes had filled the Boston
newspapers while Sacco and Vanzetti were on trial, now held their
meeting in New York and passed a resolution that the case was to be
barred from the screen forever, and that all films of it should be
destroyed. Said Betty, the ferocious: “The great American whore covers
us with her skirts!”
Said Cornelia: “They must have found out what Bart thought of them!
Do you remember, Betty, what he wrote in ‘Events and Victims’?” She
looked up the manuscript, and found the passage in which Vanzetti had
described the entertainment which American capitalism was supplying for
its wage-slaves. “That ought to be published!” exclaimed Betty, and Joe
made a copy of it; but alas, there was no paper in Boston which could
be lured into printing such blasphemous words!
X
Sunday the day of the funeral. The crowds in Hanover Street made all
movement difficult; they were so great that people were pushed through
plate glass windows, and when these crashed there was a panic, because
the crowd thought the police had started shooting. In the roped off
area were two hearses and several limousines; oh, crowning insult--they
were Packard cars! The supersalesman, now enjoying his hard-earned
vacation, was making money as usual! In one car, with curtains drawn,
rode the widow and children of Sacco and the sister of Vanzetti, both
women in a state of collapse. It was an Italian funeral, with great
floral wreaths borne by mourners, and the undertaker marching in a
Prince Albert coat and top hat, in spite of a drizzling rain. State
police--the “Cossacks”--rode ahead and alongside the hearses, to see
that the procession followed the prescribed route. In the rear followed
several open cars full of flowers, and several with mourners, among
them Cornelia Thornwell.
The authorities had given the necessary permit, and had not limited the
number of persons who might march in the procession; but they dared not
let it be too big, for the sake of the moral effect. So the entire
march was a series of battles between those who were determined to
march, and the police who were trying to break them up and shunt them
off into side streets, even if some had to be killed in the process.
The members of the committee and friends of the defense had provided
themselves with red arm-bands, reading: “Remember Justice Crucified.
August 22, 1927,” and the wearers of these arm-bands were singled out
for the fiercest attacks.
The procession moved down Hanover Street, and fifty thousand people
fell in behind after it had passed. So when they came into Scollay
Square, mounted policemen rode into the middle of the throng, and tried
to form a line across the street, barring the bulk of the procession.
The crowds dodged this way and that, to get by; the policemen began to
wield their clubs, galloping their horses, and trampling men and women
beneath the iron-shod hoofs. But a frenzy possessed the mourners; it
was their last chance to express their loathing of the crime that had
been committed, and of the criminals who had done it, and thousands
were ready to die rather than be cut out from the parade. They broke
through again and again, and screaming and cursing people were knocked
down, or jammed through the windows of stores; the younger and
more fleet-footed went racing around the block, so as to catch the
procession farther on.
The hearses continued down Tremont Street, and came to Park Street, the
corner of the Common, where the State House with the golden dome may be
seen upon the hill. To march up Beacon Street and past that State House
had been a fond dream of the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti. To keep
them from realizing it, the police had not merely made a solid blockade
of trucks across Park Street, but had a gang of laborers come and take
up the paving blocks from sections of the street. The laborers stood
watching the show, until the hearses and the crowd had passed; then
they replaced the paving!
The procession moved along Tremont Street; on one side the Common,
on the other the fashionable shops. A solid mass of people all the
way, filling the sidewalks; the newspapers estimated that two hundred
thousand saw the hearses go by. The marchers would have taken all
day, if the police had let them alone. But at Charles Street they had
another device; line after line of empty taxi-cabs drawn up, waiting
for the hearses and the little group of mourners to pass; then the
taxis broke out into the throng. It was against the law to break into a
funeral, but there was no law in Boston except the will of the police.
Who was paying the taxi-cabs for the service was not known. Their
efforts were futile, for the people kept breaking through at risk of
their lives.
No order was possible to the marchers; they just walked as they could;
the crowds fell in behind, mostly with bared heads, in spite of the
heavy rain that had begun to fall. Betty and Joe, Mary Donovan, Powers
Hapgood, Alfred Baker Lewis--all the leaders were there. They were
spreading flowers on the street--but that was against a city ordinance,
said Mike Crowley, who rode with the procession, greatly astonished to
see how many men and women were willing to get soaked for the sake of
two anarchist wops.
Out through the South End; the friends of the defense now forming lines
with linked arms for protection against the police. By the time they
came to Roxbury Crossing, they had a military formation, and were able
to keep the traffic from breaking them up, in spite of all efforts. The
traffic police would signal for traffic to break into the procession,
and cars would force their way a few feet amid cat-calls and screams;
then they would give up, and Sacco and Vanzetti would have their way
for the first time in Boston. One policeman forced a seven-ton truck
into the crowd; the truck driver was attacked with umbrellas, and when
the policeman tried to draw his club, he was swept aside.
It was in that part of Boston called Jamaica Plain that the orders
came to break up the parade at all hazards. A small army of patrolmen
charged into the crowd, wielding their clubs right and left. One
patrolman made his attack in an automobile--darting this way and that,
running people down, a new sport. Others climbed into the cars of the
sympathizers, and clubbed the drivers, and drove the cars out of the
line. Even the hard-boiled newspaper reporters were astonished by
the sights they saw in that battle, and were permitted by their city
editors to write a few plain sentences telling the incidents:
“One officer was to be seen beating a woman in the face with his
fist. A girl was standing near the coal company office, her face
buried in her hands with a split chin.... A policeman stuck his
pistol at the window of a taxi-cab, then turned suddenly, went to
another car, dragged a man out to kick him toward Boston. Persons
who were riding on running boards of autos and taxi-cabs were
dragged off and beaten or booted in the direction of Boston. By
this time the main body was in flight toward Boston, pursued by a
line of policemen who still used their clubs. Women were given no
mercy in the panic.... While one man was being beaten by a sergeant
with an umbrella, his hat was knocked off and, stooping to pick it
up, he was booted by a patrolman. He went down and the patrolman
kicked the hat high in the air.”
It was the process known as “Americanization.”
XI
Ten thousand persons were crowded about the Forest Hills cemetery, with
hundreds of policemen to keep them from getting inside. The hearses
were passed in, and the cars with the reporters and photographers, and
a little group of mourners; the rest of those who had marched eight
miles to attend the ceremony had to stand about outside--unless they
were lively enough to climb the hedge and the iron picket fence. Inside
the little chapel a hundred persons were gathered, and the two coffins
were set upon a dais, covered with flowers, and Mary Donovan took her
place beside them, white and trembling. For two years she had made the
cause of Sacco and Vanzetti her life; she had given up her religion,
her friends, her job; and now it was her opportunity to speak the last
words which the defense had to say to the rulers of Boston.
She lifted her voice; and then--a miracle, such as happens when martyrs
are made in this world! It was discovered that the heart and brain of
Vanzetti, supposed to be in the possession of the medicos of Harvard,
so that they might probe into the secrets of how to be noble and how
to be eloquent and how to be a master of English prose--that heart and
brain had escaped from under their scalpels, and were here in the body
of a frail Irish girl, a reformed Catholic, speaking words which would
be woven into the texture of the new religion of humanity, and learned
by school children under the new dispensation. Said Mary Donovan,
addressing Boston’s martyrs:
“Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. You came to America seeking
freedom. In the strong idealism of youth you came as workers searching
for that liberty and equality of opportunity heralded as the particular
gift of this country to all newcomers. You centered your labors
in Massachusetts, the very birthplace of American ideals. And now
Massachusetts and America have killed you--murdered you because you
were anarchists.
“Two hundred and thirty-five years ago the ruling people of this State
hanged women in Salem charging them with witchcraft. The shame of those
old acts of barbarism can never be wiped out. But they are as nothing
beside this murder which modern Massachusetts has committed upon you.
The witch-hangers were motivated by the superstitious fear of an
emotional religion. Their minds were blinded by their selfish passion
to reach heaven.
“The minds of those who have killed you were not blinded. They have
committed the act in deliberate cold blood. For more than seven years
they had every chance to know the truth about you. Not once did they
even dare mention the quality of your characters--a quality so noble
and shining that millions have come to be guided by it. They refused
to look. They allowed the bitter prejudice of class, position and
self-interest to close their eyes. They cared more for wealth, comfort
and institutions than they did for truth. You, Sacco and Vanzetti,
are the victims of the crassest plutocracy the world has known since
ancient Rome.
“Your long years of torture and your last hours of supreme agony are
the living banner under which we and our descendants for generations
to come will march to accomplish that better world based on the
brotherhood for which you died.
“In your martyrdom we will fight on and conquer.
“Remember Justice Crucified. August 22. Remember.”
XII
Those who had strong nerves were privileged to go back into the
crematory, and look through a glass plate into the “retorts,” and see
the two bodies being resolved into their original elements--dust unto
dust, ashes unto ashes. Those who could not stand the ordeal by fire,
went out to face an ordeal by water; a downpour of rain such as Boston
had rarely seen, almost a cloudburst. A more superstitious age would
have said that the heavenly powers desired to wash the city clean, the
blood from its streets and the blot from its name. One of those natural
portents, like the rending of the veil in the temple, which accompany
the making of martyrs!
Yes, Boston had rejected the advice of the shrewd old Frenchman, and
made two martyrs. Mystic beings, with supernatural virtues, destined
to become a legend; to expand like the genii released from the bottle,
until they spread over the sky, completely overshadowing the city
and its fame. No more would Boston be the place of the tea-party and
the battle of Bunker Hill; Boston would be the place where Sacco and
Vanzetti were put to death!
And those two, the shining ones, the holy, who died to make freedom
for the workers! Already one saw the history of martyrology repeating
itself: the process of two thousand years crowded into one. Already
they were canonized beings, concerning whom it was forbidden to speak
any word but of praise; already there were men who worshiped their
ashes, and imprisoned those who followed their example!
And yet, obscurely, the symbol was working in the souls of men. A
hundred million toilers knew that two comrades had died for them.
Black men, brown men, yellow men--men of a hundred nations and a
thousand tribes--the prisoners of starvation, the wretched of the
earth--experienced a thrill of awe. It was the mystic process of
blood-sacrifice, by which through the ages salvation has been brought
to mankind!
A hundred million workers, shackled and blind, groping in a poison
fog manufactured by their masters, learned that two of their fellows
had been put to death for lifting the banner of freedom. In spite of
all the wrangling of the radical sects, that was a fact the meaning
of which could never be obscured; a fact which shone like a pillar of
fire in the workers’ night. Bart had succeeded in the purpose he had
declared, to give a meaning to his name. “It mean joostice, it mean
freedom, it cannot mean nothing but!” To a hundred million groping, and
ten times as many still in slumber, the names of Sacco and Vanzetti
would be the eternal symbols of a dream, identical with civilization
itself, of a human society in which wealth belongs to the producers of
wealth, and the rewards of labor are to the laborers. In the words of
the prophet Isaiah:
“And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall
plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build,
and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as
the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall
long enjoy the work of their hands.”
THE END
_Note_
On October 31, 1928, with the first edition of “Boston” printed,
bound, and about to be published, there appears in the _Outlook_,
an old established weekly magazine of New York, the true story of
the Bridgewater crime, of which Vanzetti was convicted; a detailed
confession by Frank Silva, one of the bandits who committed the
crime, the confession checked in every detail, and published with the
_Outlook’s_ endorsement. The following statements in the story will be
of interest to readers of this book.
First: The “shotgun bandit” was not Vanzetti, but a professional
criminal by the name of “Doggy” Bruno, who wore a closely-cropped
mustache.
Second: Frank Silva is the man whom Fred Moore was trailing. The lawyer
visited Silva in Atlanta penitentiary, where he was serving a sentence
for another crime, and endeavored unsuccessfully to persuade Silva to
admit the truth about the Bridgewater crime.
Third: The crime was planned in the headquarters of Jimmie (“Big
Chief”) Mede, a Boston crook, and the details of the affair were known
to Mede. Fred Moore came to see Mede, then in Massachusetts State
Prison, and offered him inducements to tell the truth. Mede refused,
because he was trying to get a parole, and knew that this would
interfere. The brother of John Vahey, Vanzetti’s lawyer at the Plymouth
trial, came in haste to Mede, along with “Joseph Ross” (that Rossi who
was interpreter at the Dedham trial, and was frequently Judge Thayer’s
chauffeur) and warned Mede to tell nothing about the Sacco-Vanzetti
case.
Fourth: When Sacco and Vanzetti were about to be executed, Mede was
so troubled in his conscience that he went to Governor Fuller, and
made a clean breast of the whole matter. Governor Fuller called in a
state detective, who so frightened Mede that he dropped the matter and
disappeared. Later, however, still worried because innocent men were
about to be executed, Mede went with two Italian lawyers to Captain
Blye of the state police, and endeavored to make a statement to him;
but Blye refused to hear him, saying: “Well, it is embarrassing; I
think it will be damned embarrassing.”
Fifth: In the efforts to check Silva’s confession, representatives
of the _Outlook_ were refused every sort of coöperation by the
Massachusetts police authorities, and mysterious threatening messages
were twice received by one of the _Outlook_ representatives in Boston.
Transcriber’s Notes
‣ Italics represented by surrounding _underscores_.
‣ Small caps converted to ALL Caps.
‣ Obvious typographic errors silently corrected.
‣ Variations in hyphenation, spelling and application of diacritic
marks kept as in the original.
‣ Correction:
p. 491: “I remember a years ago” to “I remember a few years ago”