THE BEGINNING
“You cannot kill the dream of those who find
A faith that shall restore the world to men.”
+Lucia Trent.+[2]
Past flashed the crowned roads of Vermont, then New Hampshire and
finally Massachusetts: ponds, lakes, mountains, little villages,
larch and hemlock, spruce and birch, fireweed, and mullein in bloom,
goldenrod and button bush, brook and bridge, and the old, old
farmhouses of a day gone by,--all the beauty and comfort and wealth
that lie between the Adirondack region where John Brown is buried yet
still lives, into the outskirts of Boston where some seventy-five years
ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived and wrote those famous essays which
still form part of the reading of all thoughtful men and women.
The land of “promise” for so many over so many scores of years! Beside
the road into an old Vermont farmhouse with a lean-to roof stood a
woman, shawl about her shoulders, gazing off into the trees and up to
the hills. How many generations had it been since for her people, too,
America had been the land of “promise”? The drape of shawl and angle of
the unmistakable New England back said that it had been a long, long
time.
Then we were pulling into a “marble” city where a young married couple
took the chairs opposite mine. As the wife was seating herself she saw
a package which had been dropped hastily into her chair by the porter
as he went forward.
“What’s that,--a bomb?” said the wife, looking at it with suspicion.
“Yes,” answered her husband, facetiously, “a Sacco-Vanzetti bomb.”
Derided, and so reassured, the wife sat down and the husband opened his
Sunday paper.
“Justice Holmes won’t act,” said the husband.
“What’ll they do now?” asked the wife.
“Get somebody else,” answered the husband, a young Uncle Sam, lean and
muscular and plain.
Comfort everywhere and abundance! Then the smell of the sea at night,
somehow curiously discordant with its suggestion of vast fresh spaces
of dark water and sky as we drew into the electric-lighted yet dingy
north end of Boston. I was on my way back to be with the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee as the night of respite or death approached.
“There is Judge Brandeis,” ran my thought as I walked swiftly down the
North Station platform; “he is really the hope.”
Stepping through the door to take a taxi over to Hanover Street, in
that semi-circle of electric lights, men were shouting and waving
a small pink “extra” at the top of which stood two words in big
headlines: “BRANDEIS WON’T--”
After that nothing was “visible” except the panorama of thought that
passed, a vague sense of going through the “gray” of Scollay Square,
and the knowledge that the taxi had turned around at the end of one
of the cross streets and that we were in front of “256” and the steep
stairs, two flights up, to the offices.
Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan were not there. But Joseph Moro
was,--always there, always busy.
It was his voice asking, “Have you met Miss Vanzetti?”
The memory of another voice was in my ears, that of a woman of letters
who has worked and lived in Italy more or less for thirty years and
whose books on Italy are familiar friends to many who love that land.
Again that literary friend was saying, “I understand that the Signorina
Vanzetti has behaved herself like a heroine and a lady from beginning
to end of her stay in Boston.”
But the “end” was not yet. Beside Miss Vanzetti sat Rosa Sacco. From
the glow on those sensitive faces it looked even as if a happier end
might be in sight. And then it occurred to me that both had just come
from the Scenic Auditorium meeting where they had been given so kind
a greeting from the loyal thousand gathered there. Friendship in such
an hour casts no common light. Perhaps it was the reflection of that
welcome which was still upon their faces.
And the night passed, even as those winding, hill-cupped roads of
Vermont and New Hampshire had passed. Only the panorama of dreaming and
waking was not of pond and lake, of mountain, of village and of tree,
of flower, rock, bridge, and ancient house.
The panorama was of brave men and women who, in the seven years’
struggle they had made for justice for these two workers who had been
dreaming of and working for a world without war and poverty, had shown
the principle of selflessness; those two noble prisoners back in the
Death House again, already from their hands the touch and scent of
strong leather, the silvery coolness of fish and the smell of the sea
gone forever; the Defense Committee and its counsel, without hope,
fighting on to the end; the friends who for justice’s sake--doctors,
lawyers, merchants, pastors (but no priests)--rallied about them,
giving beyond their means, working beyond their strength; and these two
loving women before me who spoke precisely and with quiet.
And somehow in those passing human pictures were all the strength,
intention, beauty of life itself, crowning dream and waking with more
wonder than hill the valley,--that valley of the shadow of death,--a
symbol towards which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were on their
way.
Defeat? Yes, of a kind, there at the Bellevue Headquarters where the
Citizens’ National Committee, an eleventh hour organization, was
sponsored by men and women of acknowledged power, already a list of 505
names, many of which are known for public service throughout whatever
parts of the earth are still socially-minded: Jane Addams, Judge Amidon
of North Dakota, Mary Austin, Howard Brubaker, J. McKeen Cattell,
John S. Codman, John R. Commons, Waldo Cook, John Dewey, Dr. Haven
Emerson, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Walcott Farnam, Mrs. J. Malcolm Forbes,
Norman Hapgood, Arthur Garfield Hays, William Ernest Hocking, John
Howard Lawson, Mary E. McDowell, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Mussey, George
E. Roewer Jr., Graham Taylor, John T. Vance, Oswald Garrison Villard,
Marian Parker Whitney, Mary E. Woolley, and some five hundred other
names representing conspicuous achievement.[3]
Nevertheless it was a Committee which in the very process of
organizing suffered from disorganization, attacked from all sides
by the consciousness of the mythology of fear which the philosophy
and economics of a century had built up and a World War consummated.
Now as swiftly and inexorably as cancer strikes the human
body,--money-symbolism, greed, class-consciousness, class-hatred,
covering themselves with the garments of respectability, law, and
patriotism, had struck into the social body. A strong Committee,
despite its strength aware of its helplessness, consisting among others
of Dr. Alice Hamilton of Harvard, Paul Kellogg of the _Survey_, Amy
Woods, Waldo Cook of the _Springfield Republican_ and John F. Moors,
was formed to represent the Citizens’ National Committee. Mr. Moors
is a Harvard Overseer as well as a banker. It was he who persuaded
President Lowell to serve on the Advisory Committee. When the decision
of the Committee was brought in, he was willing to accept it but joined
the Citizens’ National Committee to ask for clemency only. At noon
this delegation called upon the Governor. The Governor’s Secretary Mr.
MacDonald, who had handled all the material submitted to the Governor
and dealt with all the witnesses, derailed the purpose of the Committee
by greeting Waldo Cook with the accusation that Mr. Cook had accepted
a bribe of $20,000 from the Defense Committee to write his Sacco and
Vanzetti editorials for the _Springfield Republican_.
And defeat at Defense Headquarters, too? Yes, of a sort--the kind whose
terms have in them ideas which find symbolic immortality equally upon
the Cross or in the Death House.
That noon Felix Frankfurter said in the dingy corridor of Defense
Headquarters, out of the hearing of Rosa Sacco, “She must not be made
conscious of the larger issues of this thing, for now how can she think
of anything but that it is her loved one who suffers! Yet somehow, no
matter what happens to-night, I am too healthy--or something--to give
up hope. I cannot believe it is the end.”
And the spent figure of Aldino Felicani, bending to Destiny but not
broken.
And the arrow-flight of Arthur Hill’s car rushing now southward towards
the sea to ask legal intervention from one, a judge of the Supreme
Court, who, showing neither hospitality nor the quality of mercy, that
early morning missed the great opportunity of his career. Then another
flight northward, desperate, the last chance, in an open boat upon the
sea, to an island whose shoreline is a rocky temple of beauty upon
which the Defense was to meet its last shipwreck.
The day was passing. With it the hours of the two who were to be
executed were spilling swiftly from one glass to another, from life
to death. A curious sense of whirling figures grew upon one and of
futility. It was not unlike dust in sunlight. In the offices telephones
rang incessantly, telegraph messengers came and went, men and women
moved swiftly to and fro, typewriters clicked.... And in those offices
at the Bellevue, as well as at the Defense Headquarters, national, as
well as international contacts by telegraph and cable were bravely
maintained to the last.
A few figures stood out as somehow expressive, in their very
difference, of this united struggle of conscience against injustice:
John Dos Passos flitting about, cheerful, charming; Mrs. Elliott
here, as in her work for peace, fearless, gentle, quiet; Paul Kellogg
frayed with years of battle for social welfare, pale, determined; Dr.
Alice Hamilton of Harvard, strong in reserve; Waldo Cook, cool-headed,
responsible, ready at any cost, but never by any means except by the
use of reason to maintain the editorial position of the _Springfield
Republican_. Mrs. Glendower Evans, in gray, white-haired, was seated,
a Quaker-like figure in the midst of the Woman’s City Club, waiting,
talking with the friends who came to her. Mrs. Evans’s faithful
friendship to Sacco and Vanzetti, and therefore to the issues of
justice, had proved itself in more than one way. Not only had she given
the case her financial support but also she had assembled evidence
with, as a friend wrote of her, “an insight as to its value in court
which was worthy of a mind long-trained by court practice.” Best of
all was the gift of herself, so complete that she was troubled not to
have been able to share even imprisonment.
And there was Powers Hapgood testing the free assemblage and free
speech issue again and yet again, thinking, as Paul Kellogg wrote of
him in the _Survey_, “If, when the lives of two men were at stake and
thousands of working people believed they weren’t getting justice at
the hands of the courts, you couldn’t even get a permit to discuss
the issue on Boston Common, then it looked as if we had let our old
liberties be scrapped for us and political action didn’t offer a way
out. And they would be scrapped, if we didn’t exercise our rights and
show that men believed in them.”
Assuredly in those thirteen days in Boston from the tenth of August
to the twenty-second, when the issue of justice hung in the balance,
with those in power there was no spirit of making good a mistake
either by experience or by free discussion. Boston Regnant through
Chief of Police Crowley denied all requests for use of the Common.
And even upon that night of the twenty-second Crowley was to refuse
Miss Hale’s request for the use of Bunker Hill Monument as a place for
free assemblage, “where the people might repeat the Lord’s Prayer or
sing hymns.” It is not improbable that many sorts and conditions of
Americans who, for conscience’ sake, assembled in Boston during those
days, wondered in what traditions of free speech and free assemblage
the police representation of those in power had been trained. It is
certain that the social and political education of those who controlled
the police had included the name of John Stuart Mill and possibly even
a certain paragraph from that most famous of his essays +ON LIBERTY+:
“+BUT THE PECULIAR EVIL OF SILENCING THE EXPRESSION OF AN OPINION IS,
THAT IT IS ROBBING THE HUMAN RACE; POSTERITY AS WELL AS THE EXISTING
GENERATION; THOSE WHO DISSENT FROM THE OPINION, STILL MORE THAN
THOSE WHO HOLD IT. IF THE OPINION IS RIGHT, THEY ARE DEPRIVED OF THE
OPPORTUNITY OF EXCHANGING ERROR FOR TRUTH; IF WRONG, THEY LOSE, WHAT
IS ALMOST AS GREAT A BENEFIT, THE CLEARER PERCEPTION AND LIVELIER
IMPRESSION OF TRUTH, PRODUCED BY ITS COLLISION WITH ERROR.... WE CAN
NEVER BE SURE THAT THE OPINION WE ARE ENDEAVORING TO STIFLE IS A FALSE
OPINION; AND IF WE WERE SURE, STIFLING IT WOULD BE AN EVIL STILL.+”
Throughout the day it seemed clearer and clearer, where much was
confused, that already as individuals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti were being lost sight of, that already they were gone from
our midst--though they had still a few hours to live--and had become
symbolic of issues more important than the life of any human being can
ever be.
And then another figure in the midst of many: Alfred Baker Lewis,
himself just out of the police station, coming swiftly through the
hotel lobby.
Catching sight of me, he called, “A lot of them have been arrested and
we haven’t any money left to bail them. Have you any?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I’ll take over what I have and get more. Where
shall I go?”
“They’re in the Joy Street Police Station. Mary Donovan’s there.” And
he was gone.
So was I in a quick shift from the Bellevue to the lock-up and the
greeting with Mary Donovan standing by her “people” in and out of jail.
In the flight to and fro in which, through Amy Woods, John Dos
Passos, Mrs. Glendower Evans, Arthur Garfield Hays, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and some other generous friends, more than enough money was
collected to bail out a group of over one hundred and fifty men and
women, certain fragments of pictures stood out: a young man, stunted
in growth, with pure childlike face, being hustled down Joy Street
between two officers twice his size;[4] Professor Ellen Hayes of
Wellesley being taken to the patrol wagon on the arm of a young
Irish bluecoat--untroubled, serene, “a grand soul” as Mary Donovan
said of her later that day; some groups of garment workers cheering
their comrades at the risk of being themselves arrested; Edna St.
Vincent Millay seated in the bail room, her grave, dark husband,
Eugene Boissevin, standing beside her; Clarina Michelson, with energy
undiminished by the Passaic strike, cheerful, kindly, being bailed;
Lola Ridge coming out of the inner guard room, her face solemn in the
solemn hours that were passing.
Nevertheless that jail will remain in my memory as the only gay place
which I saw in those thirteen days.
From one nice-looking group being herded in, a voice called blithely,
“Here come some more of these jail birds!”
They looked it, America’s youth, best and bravest! And within that
station were being deposited the many placards which many had been
carrying, among them one which had in it the meaning of all the
others,--Paula Halliday’s SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI! IS JUSTICE DEAD?
Here were none of those who, to quote a line from Laura Simmons’s
sonnet, kept their “prudent way within the crowd.” While I waited in
the bailing room where, in addition to the bail asked, the bailer
collected two dollars for each arrest--his way of earning a living!--a
man, pointing to a suit case, asked me to sit down. It was kindness,
and in such a place well to cultivate kindness.
For awhile all the windows were shut tight. Within a space adequate
for two score there were packed over several hours almost seven times
that number. The windows were closed, for some fifty garment workers
were chanting the Internationale, their triumphant, militant song of
brotherhood.
From the guard room Clarina Michelson, Helen Todd, Lola Ridge, and
others were being let out. Mary Donovan seemed anxious about some who
should be bailed at once, among them Powers Hapgood. She turned to look
for him, but, strangely, he was gone. And with him the day was going,
too.
The last night had come. At Defense Headquarters, Louis Bernheimer was
sending and receiving messages. He was as suddenly and mysteriously
present on this night as he had been independently and mysteriously
active in behalf of the Defense Committee, for unknown to the
Committee, Mr. Bernheimer had written and circulated 30,000 pamphlets
to ministers throughout the country. A graduate of Yale in 1917, an
air pilot in France during the war, a student of Chinese philosophy, a
hermit, he had already been a source of influence to the Committee.
Powerful, cynically courageous, he betrayed his emotion by no conscious
sign. Unconsciously, however, he revealed the strain under which he
worked, for every once in a while he whispered to himself.
The wire Louis Bernheimer handled kept efficient touch with all who
belonged in that office and yet were not there. Inside the office
the editor of an Italian paper, Serafino Romualdi, was taking notes,
now asking how to spell “monument,” then checking against some other
unfamiliar word.
Via the telephone the office knew that Mary Donovan, a lawyer with her,
had hurried out to the psychiatric hospital to which the state police
had been taking Powers Hapgood even as she had turned to find him
somehow mysteriously vanished.
The office knew, too, that Gardner Jackson and his sister, Dr. Edith
Jackson, were on their way with Mrs. Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti to
the State House to make one last appeal to a cast-iron executive; and
that Michael Angelo Musmanno and Aldino Felicani were on their way
back from their farewell in the Death House, Mr. Musmanno to act as
interpreter for Vanzetti’s sister, Aldino Felicani to return to the
Defense office.
What was there for two women to do, for Ruth Hale and for me? An
age-old prerogative of women: feed hungry men. Others would be coming
in, and they, too, whether they knew it or not would need food. And no
food except a bag of peanuts was on that table banked with telegrams,
letters and carbons. We went out after coffee and sandwiches and milk.
Waiting, we, too, had coffee on the clean table by the cool window of
that little Italian restaurant one flight up. We read there words from
a letter which had come from a young editor: “It seems so inextricably
intertwined with the most inert and selfish of human motives, the
desire to be comfortable, not to be bothered, to maintain the _status
quo_, to keep things as they’ve always been, to defend institutions
from attack, to get rid of men of that type. Reason is no longer in
evidence. And I have yielded momentarily, more than once to the weak
wish that it was all over and filed away neatly.”
Quickly now--after seven years of delay--one sort of “filing” would
soon be done and over. And then that letter which had come straight
out of the heart of youth leapt into flame: “One is removed from life
and death, from all emotion, and suspended in a desperate abyss, where
calmness and self-control are the things most needed. Events happen,
and are seen in crystalline stillness. But the mind, the soul, continue
the hopeless struggle, for all is not lost, as long as the desire for
justice persists.”
For all is not lost as long as the desire for justice persists! Around
the corner from Headquarters over in Salem Street in the rooms of
the Hod Carriers’ Union, the “desire” was most certainly persisting.
Mother Bloor had come all the way from California to speak for justice
for Sacco and Vanzetti. Lola Ridge and John Howard Lawson had passed
through Headquarters and had gone over to Salem Street to speak for
justice.
As we sat on, quiet in the tense office, messages coming and going,
now and then a cup of coffee being poured or a sandwich eaten, in my
thoughts were lines from Lola Ridge’s “Two in the Death House” which,
repeated to me the week before, she was now chanting over in Salem
Street.
“You have endured those moments, you
Close to the rough nap of earth, and knowing her perennial ways.
And when, on some one of your counted mornings, light
That pulls at the caught root of things
Has pierced you with a touch, or leavened air,
* * * * *
You too have hoped--with the ardor of young shoots, renascent under
concrete,
And with them have gone down to defeat again.”[5]
Dos Passos, flitting into the office, called: “It’s more cheerful over
there! Come on over!”
Then suddenly, when Miss Hale and I were already halfway down the
stairs, from the street came uproar, and the rush of many feet and the
sound of hundreds of voices.
Mother Bloor had been arrested for speaking out the window of the Hod
Carriers’ Union to some five hundred people who had been unable to get
inside.
When the police were heard coming up the stairs of the Hod Carriers’
Union to get her, Fred Beale, a splendid type of young man, threw his
arm about Mother Bloor to protect her, saying, “You mustn’t let them
get you!”
Brave as always, she disengaged his arm, and said, “You’ll have to let
me go with them, Fred!”
And quietly she went away with the police, and from Hanover Street had
come the angry shout, “Mother Bloor’s been arrested!”
Putting my hand on Ruth Hale’s arm, I held her where she was. She had
done her best to get Crowley to give a permit for the use of Bunker
Hill Monument for all who would meet together and speak. And she had
failed. Now was not the time for any one to “strike” again.
Dos Passos had disappeared, and we went back up through the outer
office and on into the office where messages came and went and there
was more silence than speech.
The outer office filled up and emptied intermittently, rich and
poor alike coming and going. From a brave mission to plead with the
Governor, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and a friend were there, like the
brave gentlewomen they are, standing fraternally in the outer office.
From that outer office, too, came the sound of a woman’s voice,
curiously deep, speaking with a slight accent: “They wanted us to
come over and now they don’t want us. We have worked hard and made
sacrifices. They want all the power. We want some power, too, and we
are going to have it. During the war, thinking my name was German, the
dirty dogs framed me. And then they found I wasn’t German and had to
let me go. They think they hold a first mortgage on us, do they? But
they--”
Who were “they”? Was that the government, political wealth, or what was
it? Were those the terms in which our foreign born now thought of this
land of promise?
Mother Bloor, quickly bailed by Mary Donovan and quickly back, was
seated in the outer office.
But a small group from the Hod Carriers’ Union was making its way out
to Charlestown Prison. There, now, Sacco and Vanzetti were momently
expecting the summons to that chair visible from their adjoining cells,
with its
“---- cap that pours into the brain
The livid needles of its pain.”[6]
At eleven o’clock the group led by Lola Ridge having received neither
orders nor suggestions from Defense Headquarters, they had started, a
straggling half hundred, for Charlestown.
In sight of the roofs of the Jail, Lola Ridge had found herself in the
lead, holding by the hand a small school-girl who had accompanied them
from the start.
Jail in sight the school-girl had said, “Here is where I say good-by to
you!”
With a young Scotchman and another girl, Lola Ridge slipped under the
ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the
Prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her.
As he reined in his horse fairly over her, she heard him whispering in
a frightened voice, “What do you want?”
Daring the trooper to ride her down, she refused to leave the rope.
Suddenly there was the uproar of conflict. A group of men from the
straggling fifty she had led, had thrown themselves between her and the
police now closing in upon her.
A friend, Carline Murphy, knowing, as the men did, that an order had
been given for Lola Ridge’s arrest, slipped in beside her.
While the conflict between the men and the police continued, Carline
Murphy drew her away, saying, “Lola, come! I know a way to get near the
Jail.”
This she did to save her, and, still asserting that she knew a way to
get near the Jail, they were lost in the crowd.
Mary Donovan, too, was back again in the inner office. She and the
lawyer had seen Powers Hapgood. Now she was urged to drink a cup of
coffee and eat a sandwich.
As she bit into the large sandwich, humor flashed over the pale face.
“This is what I call strong bread!” she exclaimed.
And while she ate, she was giving an account of Powers Hapgood.
Before they were allowed to see him, they had been kept waiting two
hours because the Superintendent said he had “to have his little
tea.” Admitted, they had found Hapgood in bed and eager to tell his
experiences.
When the attendants had asked him why he was there, Powers Hapgood had
replied, “For trying to help save Sacco and Vanzetti.”
Then the attendants had called these Italians “wops” and had told Mr.
Hapgood he was in the very bed in which Sacco had been.
An attendant said supper was ready.
Would he like some?
What was it?
Beef stew.
And Powers Hapgood had said, “No, I don’t want beef stew. I’m a
vegetarian.”
“And after that,” said Mary Donovan, humor bubbling up again, “they
were sure he was psychopathic.”
The attendants, who seemed to be a “gentle lot,” had then given Mr.
Hapgood an eggnog and some bread and butter.
Gardner Jackson and Dr. Edith Jackson came in. Gardner Jackson sat down
by the telephone. There was silence. They had come from the Governor’s
office, on their return leaving Rosa Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti at
Lilian Haley’s.
Dr. Edith Jackson, her head between her hands, spoke in a trembling
voice, “Twice the Governor said, waving his hand toward Rosa Sacco and
Signorina Vanzetti, ‘It is these ladies that move me most.’”
And some in that office wondered, “Was it?”
Heard, too, over the Governor’s telephone during that hour was the
ringing voice of Attorney Thompson who believed, and still believes in
the innocence of these two men.
In the Secretary’s office, where he stayed while the others went in to
the Governor with Michael Angelo Musmanno to act as interpreter,--in
the Secretary’s office, Gardner Jackson was offered a cigar!
Mary Donovan spoke less and less, answering an occasional inquiry which
came from the “friend’s house” where again Rosa Sacco was waiting for
the end, but this time not only with faithful, fearless Lilian Haley
beside her but also Signorina Vanzetti.
And again at Headquarters all were waiting, with hope, without hope....
On that night of August twenty-second, haunting phrases, aspects of
courage that did not flinch, many invisible presences in remembered
word and look and act were with those who assembled in Defense
Headquarters and wherever a group was gathered together in the name of
Sacco and Vanzetti.
At the telephone the voice of Gardner Jackson, as the minutes passed
became more and more quiet: “Was the execution to go forward?”
“No news?”
“Bad!”
“No, nothing,--nothing at all!”
So the brief inquiries and monosyllabic answers followed one another.
Beyond the doors of Defense Headquarters events went forward that will
never be recorded, and all expressive of sympathy for this tragedy
reaching its visible climax.
One experience was that of Helen Peabody, the artist, who also had made
her way out to the Jail, got detached from her group, and had been
arrested. She was taken into Charlestown Prison where in the guard room
a courteous police officer had offered her a chair.
Suddenly she realized that she was within the very walls that held
Sacco and Vanzetti,--there where they were about to die. In her thought
saluting them, Helen Peabody continued to stand. Placing her hand upon
the walls that held Sacco and Vanzetti, she stood at attention in that
jail guard room till after midnight.
As midnight approached at Defense Headquarters, even when there was
speech there was yet stillness in those offices.
During that hour before midnight Debs was spoken of,--the fact that
the last money order he had been able to make out had been for this
Committee.
And some one in the office said, “All day thoughts have been repeating
a prayer taught when we were children, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’
They have nothing to regret. They are good children. They will sleep
well.”
Aldino Felicani, sitting with bent head, answered gently, “What are two
lives! It is the ideal.”
It was midnight. Quiet and more quiet, Gardner Jackson was speaking at
the telephone.
Madeiros was gone.
Once a thief had hung on either side, the Christ between. Now, two
idealists, not one, as if symbol of an achieved fellowship for which
Christ had lived and died, and but one thief. These two, atheists
though they might be, of the Brotherhood of Christ.
And perhaps in the moment when from Nicola Sacco they were cutting
off speech with the straps guards were fixing about his head and the
Death House heard him calling out those last words: “Long live anarchy!
Farewell my wife and child and all my friends!... Farewell, Mother!”
came a cry from Mary Donovan, “I can’t--I can’t believe it!”
Her brother and a friend were swiftly at her side, there was the snap
of an ammonia capsule, and control quickly regained. Still that belief
in the ultimate kindness of the law.
Vanzetti next,--gentleman of a gentle land, shaking hands with his
guards, thanking Warden Hendry for his kindness, and, even as they
blindfolded him, from this atheist those Christlike words: “I wish to
forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
In the ears of those who stood in that Death House must have rung down
two thousand years of time the words of Another, “Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do!”
Through the inner door of Defense Headquarters tumbled the Italian
editor. Unable to speak, the breath in him shaking the whole man, he
bit at a roll of papers he held in his hand.
Then, crying out convulsively, “They are gone!” he threw himself head
and shoulders, sobbing, upon the table.
And in that moment there was no separation between manhood and tears.
They were one and alike beautiful.
Most courteous and most sensitive brother of ours, you meet a double
tragedy. _From what_ did you come? _To what_ have you come? Fleeing
Fascism in your lovely land, what is it you have gained here in this
country of which Sacco wrote as “always in my dreams”?[7] Is it
freedom? Is it the ideal? What was it that--the ideal--you hoped of
your land of promise?
From the outer office, some weeping, all quietly, they were going down
the steep stairs.
In the inner office Mary Donovan spoke, “Come, let us not answer the
telephone any more.”
And we went out, in groups or alone, down the stairs, and into the
night.
Those thirteen days from August tenth to August twenty-second were over.
Then, after hours that seemed eternity, the way back to the foothills
of the Adirondacks where John Brown lies buried. Land of promise,
beauty and wealth everywhere! Hills and rushing streams of the
Berkshires in the summer sunlight, the deep valley of the Hudson in
the heat of afternoon, in the dusk the thin ribbon of water and first
cliffs of Lake Champlain.
In my thoughts were another beautiful land and another Brotherhood
struggling for justice, Padraic Pearse and his poem “+TO DEATH+”:
Of wealth or of glory
I shall leave nothing behind me
(I think it, O God, enough!)
But my name in the heart of a child.
The train came to an unexpected stop outside a little fortress town,
among the first of those historic towns on Lake Champlain.
Above the sudden quiet, I heard a high-pitched woman’s voice, “That
Italian case that was on at Boston.”
“When?” asked another woman who sat beside her.
“To-night. But I didn’t get tuned in in time and--”
With a jerk, through the dark, the train went on.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
[3] _V._ Appendix C., pp. 108-120, for the 505 names of the initial list
taken by Paul U. Kellogg, editor of the _Survey_.
[4] The author of “Thirteen Days” has thought many times of the
unfairness and omissions inevitable in any attempt to make adequate or
accurate records during such days of confusion. Although he will be
found among those who stand up and are counted again and yet again, the
author does not know the name of the stunted boy with the beautiful
face. Another illustration of the incompleteness of such a record as
this--if such illustration is needed!--is the fact that several men and
women who during those last years were of supreme comfort to the doomed
men were those who because of age or illness or distance were not
present at the end. For example, Alice Stone Blackwell to whom Vanzetti
wrote a very large number of letters.
[5] To be found entire in “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent
and Ralph Cheyney.
[6] From a poem by E. Merrill Root in “America Arraigned,” edited by
Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
[7] “The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,” edited by Marion Denman
Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, p. 10.... Students of these issues
should read, too, the valuable appendices to “The Letters.”