Chapter I: Preface

The decision to write this novel was taken at nine-thirty P.M. (Pacific Coast time), August 22nd, 1927: the occasion being the receipt of a telephone message from a newspaper, to the effect that Sacco and Vanzetti were dead. It seemed to the writer that the world would want to know the truth about this case; and his judgment proved correct, because there began a flood of cablegrams and letters from five continents, asking him to do the very thing he had decided upon.

A “contemporary historical novel” is an unusual art-form, and may call for explanation. So far as concerns the two individuals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, this book is not fiction, but an effort at history; everything they are represented as doing they actually did, and their words have been taken from their letters, or from the dictation of friends and enemies. All others who played important parts in this drama likewise appear as they were, and under their own names.

Paralleling the Sacco-Vanzetti case throughout the book is a story of business and high finance which will be recognized as a famous law case recently carried to the United States Supreme Court. I have used the incidents of this case as material for my fiction; but the characters which I have invented to enact this story are wholly fictitious, and bear no relation whatever to the real persons in the case, who are entirely unknown to me. There is one simple rule for guidance in reading the novel: the characters who are real persons bear real names, while those who bear fictitious names are fictitious characters.

The writer has been visiting Boston off and on for twenty-five years. The first visits had to do with the novel “Manassas,” and involved meetings with the city’s old-time heroes, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, Julia Ward Howe. The later visits, having to do with “The Brass Check,” “The Goose-step” and “Oil!”, involved a change of view-point not without its interest to students of our history. Nevertheless, it should be said at the outset that what is great in Boston finds due recognition in this story. Those who have made the city’s glory have never been its rulers, but always a “saving minority,” and that minority is there to-day, and it is active.

The task has not been approached in a spirit of grudge; on the contrary, the writer regards with a mixture of gratitude and amusement those Boston officials who provided for “Oil!” an advertisement which went around the world several times. To them he owes the fact that he is almost out of debt to his printer, for the first time in twenty-five years as publisher of his own writings. An honest effort has here been made to portray a complex community exactly as it is. The story has no hero but the truth, and its heroines are two women, one old and the other young, who are ardently seeking the truth.

The complete legal record of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is soon to be published in six volumes. I would have checked by this record every statement having to do with legal proceedings, but unfortunately a few documents were not accessible at the time of writing. I had the 3,900 pages of the Dedham trial testimony, but the Plymouth trial testimony, of which only one copy existed, was withheld from me. I have checked my narrative by many documents derived from the record, and had the manuscript read by a dozen persons who have made an eight-year study of the case. I have omitted every statement concerning which doubt has been voiced, and the story contains no errors of any real significance. It so happens that the important thing in connection with the Sacco-Vanzetti case is to know, not what a certain witness testified, but how he came to testify at all. Those who read my story attentively will get the meaning of this remark.

I wish to make clear that I have not written a brief for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. I have tried to be a historian. What I think I know, I have told the reader. What is uncertain, I have so portrayed--and have let the partisans of both sides voice their feelings and beliefs. My book will not satisfy either side completely; both have already expressed dissent--which I take to mean that I have done my job.

I desire to acknowledge my great indebtedness to James Fuchs and Floyd Dell for valuable literary criticism, and to many Bostonians and ex-Bostonians for advice and help. So many of these prefer to have their thanks in private that I confine myself to this general acknowledgment. Also I owe apology to persons active in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, whose letters and adventures I have purloined and assigned to my fictitious characters. Extraordinary adventures--let no one say that romance is gone from the world! Also, let no fiction-writer imagine that his powers of invention can rival those of the Great Novelist who makes up history!

I think I should add that “Cornelia,” the heroine of this story, is a lady eighty-six years of age, an old friend of mine, who ran away from her family at the age of sixty as I have described. But this lady never had anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and my character, “Cornelia,” bears no relation to any of the ladies who interested themselves in that case.

CONTENTS

VOLUME I

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE RUNAWAY GRANDMOTHER 1

II. PLYMOUTH ROCK 35

III. DAGO RED 68

IV. YOUNG AMERICA 91

V. THE SAVING MINORITY 128

VI. WHITE TERROR 156

VII. DEPORTATION DAYS 187

VIII. THE DETECTIVE MACHINE 219

IX. THE WEB OF FATE 247

X. THE LEGAL SYSTEM 280

XI. THE GRAFT RING 312

XII. SHADOWS BEFORE 346

VOLUME II

XIII. TRIAL BY JURY 375

XIV. JUDGE FURY 403

XV. THE WHISPERING GALLERY 445

XVI. THE LAW’S DELAY 478

XVII. THE MILLS OF THE LAW 510

XVIII. THE SUPERSALESMAN 540

XIX. ACADEMIC AUTOCRACY 573

XX. THE DECISION 605

XXI. DAYS OF GRACE 639

XXII. THE CITY OF FEAR 674

XXIII. THE LAST ENEMY 706

XXIV. THE TRIUMPH 730

BOSTON