Chapter X: The Legal System (1)

I

On the 11th of September, 1920, the grand jury of Norfolk County brought indictments against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charging them with the murder of the paymaster and guard at South Braintree in the previous April. This county shared with Plymouth the same district attorney; and Nick and Bart were brought before the same Judge Thayer. They pleaded not guilty, and the trial was set for February. Meantime Bart went back to the tailor-shop at Charlestown, serving his sentence for the Bridgewater crime; while Nick returned to the county jail at Dedham--a very unhappy man, because they gave him nothing whatever to do in this prison, and he nearly went out of his mind.

Meantime a little group in Boston set about organizing what they called the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. In the beginning it consisted entirely of Italians, the foremost among them being Aldino Felicani, anarchist printer, a tall, ascetic-looking young man, soft-voiced and reserved. He would set up type for the circulars, and translate them into Italian. Others would address envelopes, and visit the meeting-places of radicals in neighboring towns, and circulate subscription lists. So would come a few dollars here and a few dollars there. At the outset there was no office, no secretary, only the volunteer labors of a few comrades.

Joe Randall had finished his book on the “White Terror”; he had lost hope of bringing it up to date, since events happened faster than pen could move. Now he became a volunteer press agent for the committee; he wrote news stories, and made carbon copies, and went about trying to cajole this editor and that into giving a little publicity. With him came another young journalist, Art Shields, a tireless worker; you would see lights burning and hear typewriters clicking in the office until two or three o’clock in the morning. Betty learned to make speeches, and put her youth and beauty and social prestige to work; she would visit labor headquarters and “vamp” the officials, seeking to overcome the bitter prejudice of Irish-Catholic and Yankee labor leaders against a pair of wops who were admitted to be infidels, anarchists and draft-dodgers. Cornelia and Betty would go together to places where they encountered ladies with blue blood ever so slightly tinged with pink. The services the pair had rendered to the suffrage cause--now victorious--gave them prestige, and they could get small checks.

The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee was from the outset a peculiar organization. It consisted largely of a name, and nobody could say just who were its members, or what was their authority. Those Americans who later joined and helped to build it up did so from sympathy with an oppressed group, and they served as a “front”; they were featured in the newspapers, they made speeches, and conferred respectability. But they did not know so much about the case, and naturally they had to defer to the Italians in a crisis.

Among these latter, also, appeared a division; there was an Italian “front”: such men as Felicani, the printer, and Felice Guadagni, the journalist whom Cornelia had met when he came down to help in the Plymouth cordage strike; also Rosina Sacco, wife of the prisoner, an alert and intelligent woman, devoted to her husband’s cause. These were known; but there were others who stayed in the background, and in a time of crisis would reach out a hand, as it were from behind a curtain, and influence a decision. These were anarchists, intimates of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it was easy enough to understand why they kept hidden; they stood in danger of deportation, and perhaps of being accused of crimes, along with the two in jail. But it made committee functioning difficult, when you never knew what decision would be changed, or by whom, or for what reason. Public statements would be prepared and issued in English, and then translated into Italian, and the discovery would be made that the Italian version was quite different, and even contradictory; yet it would not be known just how this had happened.

There was the element of fear, and of course, the element of suspicion. It was inevitable that the enemy should send spies among the committee--and that these would be persons sufficiently cunning to pose as “good radicals.” From first to last the prosecution was fully informed as to everything that went on among the committee, the decisions that were taken as well as the arguments and the quarrels. These spies came and went; and after they were gone, they would joke about how they had collected money for the cause and spent it having a good time in their own fashion. Then you would hear the great ones of Massachusetts, who had employed these spies, solemnly charging that the funds of the committee had been stolen!

II

Among both English and Italian groups there were sharp divisions according to political beliefs. Some insisted that this was a criminal case, and should be handled as such; others thought it was a case of labor persecution, to be featured as an episode in the class struggle. Strange as it might seem, the anarchists for the most part took the former view; they saw clearly that efforts to make anarchist propaganda might not merely bring about a conviction of the two men, but might get their defenders into trouble. But a socialist like Joe Randall was free from such fear, and to him the case was an effort of big business to put two of its dangerous enemies out of the way; he could never write anything about the case that was not disguised propaganda for socialism, and of course he did not like to have his propaganda cut out by non-socialist members of the committee. Young persons like Betty Alvin, who at this stage of her life insisted that she was a communist--such young persons wanted to put in a different kind of propaganda, and their persistence increased as the case grew more conspicuous.

It was a controversy that would never cease, up to the very last hour, and even beyond it--when men and women fought with deadly bitterness over the question of what should be done with the ashes of the victims. You saw the germs of it at the first meeting, when eight or ten ill-assorted enthusiasts fell to discussing what kind of lawyer should be employed for the trial. Should they get a labor man, who would make an appeal to the movement throughout the country? Or should they get a respectable lawyer, who would confer dignity upon the case, and impress the public and the jury in the good old Boston way? Still another possibility, should they look for a criminal expert, with knowledge of the trickeries of a highly technical game? Joe and Betty united for the first plan, Cornelia urged the second, while the Italians divided between the first and third.

A powerful factor in the decision was, of course, the two prisoners, who never wavered for a moment; to them it was a class-war case, they were being persecuted because of their threat to the rich of Massachusetts. To Vanzetti the very idea of respectability was an insult, the idea of legal trickery nearly as bad. All such hopes would prove delusive, and only the labor movement could save them. “Unless a million men can be mobilized for our defense, we are lost!”--so he said in the first days, and so he said in the last.

As for Sacco, he was even more extreme; shut up in his half-dark cell in Dedham jail, he was like a rat in a trap, a creature all of steel springs and fury. He brooded incessantly, and ate his heart out, and never let himself be fooled by a hope. “They have got us, they will kill us,” he would say; and whenever his enemies came near him, he would throw his revolutionary convictions into their faces. “Viva l’anarchia!” were his last words, and this summed up his attitude at every stage of the seven years’ struggle.

III

Cornelia went downtown to have lunch with Henry Cabot Winters, who knew all the lawyers in town. First he would make the protest which family proprieties required; and then he would betray his secret amusement--being in truth rather proud of his runaway mother-in-law, who was telling the world to go to the devil in the very best “old Boston” manner.

But this time Cornelia missed the usual twinkle in Henry’s fine dark eyes. In the first place, the great lawyer was worried by some of the things he had learned that Jerry Walker had learned about him. And in the second place, Henry had been shocked by the Wall Street “bomb explosion.” Five days after the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti a wagonload of explosives had gone off in front of the building of J. P. Morgan and Company in New York, and thirty-three persons had been blown to fragments. The newspapers were certain that this was the work of anarchists, and the Boston _Traveler_ had come out with a full-page article, to the effect that the crime had been traced to the Galleani group, a vengeance for the arrest of the bandits, Sacco and Vanzetti.

“Mother, that is a horrible thing!” said Henry; and Cornelia said, yes, it was indeed horrible for a newspaper to prejudge the case of two accused men, and make it impossible for them to get a fair jury in the community. Henry, as a lawyer, must know that such an article would have that effect, and under the very strict laws of Massachusetts was contempt of court.

But Henry did not discuss that aspect of the matter. “I am told,” said he, “that the Boston anarchists made no attempt to conceal their glee when they learned of that explosion.”

“Why should they?” said Cornelia. “If they had learned that an earthquake had destroyed every building in Wall Street, they would have been still more pleased; but that would not mean they control earthquakes. Their glee expressed their conviction that the practices of Wall Street cause boundless suffering to the workers of America; and in that they are right.”

“Now, Mother,” said Henry, “let’s look at the menu. We don’t want to get off on politics.”

Cornelia laughed. “I am always entertained to discover the identity of attitude of my Back Bay and my anarchist friends. The anarchists don’t want to get off on politics either, they share your faith in direct action.”

Henry ordered the lunch; and Cornelia repeated what she had learned from the radical papers, that the explosion had been caused by a load of blasting gelatine, being illegally taken through the city in the daytime; while Henry repeated what he had read in the capitalist papers, that it was an anarchist bomb. He wanted to know, with some irritation, “Do you think that anarchists never use bombs?”

“I have been told they sometimes do.”

“Yet you can be certain these two friends of yours never did any such thing?”

“They aren’t accused of having done that, Henry.”

“I know. But people say--”

“What people, Henry?”

“Well, friends of mine who are in position to know the inside.”

“Will you tell me their names?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Did you ask who gave them the information?”

“No, but--”

“I am interested to watch the process of rumor. People say this and people say that, and always when you try to get something definite, there is nothing. Can you bring me a single fact, Henry--one that you as a first-class lawyer would respect? I am ready to deal with it honestly; and surely it’s worth the family’s while to keep me from being led into a trap.” Cornelia looked her son-in-law in his dark fine eyes, gravely and steadily; and he said all right, he would try to help her.

IV

The waiter brought oysters, since there was an “r” in the month. And after he had set down the crackers and the lemons and the paprika, and made all the necessary flourishes, he went his way, and Henry returned to the dangerous subject of bombs, which haunted the thoughts of all leisure-class Boston in those desperate days. Despite his pretenses of omniscience, Cornelia represented his only direct contact with the anarchist movement.

“You know, Mother, somebody did make bombs--the ones that went through the mail. You can’t dispute that.”

“No, of course not.”

“What do your friends say about those?”

“Vanzetti is quite certain it was a frame-up.”

“By whom?”

“Some one of the big detective agencies, which are making millions out of this anti-red agitation.”

Henry smiled pityingly. “You accept that?”

“I don’t accept it as a fact, because I don’t know. I certainly accept it as a possibility.”

“Believe me, Mother, you’ll have to look for a better alibi. Frame-ups don’t happen.”

Henry saw the pair of brown eyes fixed upon his dark ones. They were soft, and always kind, but they were persistent, and he had learned that they saw deep. “Be careful, and don’t commit yourself too completely. You may need an alibi yourself, my son.” And that was hardly fair at the beginning of a luncheon; a poor appetizer for a great lawyer who was going to be a defendant, and get large daily doses of his own medicine. His look clouded, and for a while he was less quick to interrupt.

“Five or six years ago, Henry, I’d have agreed with you about the frame-up; I’d have said it was a device of criminals in trouble, and a sign they were hard-pressed. But now I know that the frame-up is a regular weapon in the class-struggle, just as well understood as, for example, jury-fixing, or the buying of labor leaders. Did you ever have William M. Wood for a client?”

“No, Mother, I have never been that fortunate.”

“How rich is he?”

“I don’t know; pretty rich--ten or fifteen million, maybe.”

“Enough to be one of our leading industrialists, the president of our great woolen corporation. You’d think he was big enough not to frame up conspiracies against his workers, wouldn’t you? Do you happen to remember what he did in the Lawrence strike, seven or eight years ago? He couldn’t see any other way to break the union, so he had dynamite planted, to be blamed upon the union leaders. He was indicted and tried for it--”

“And acquitted, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, you know what it means for a great mill-owner to be acquitted in his own bailiwick. It is a fact that the men he hired to do the job were convicted; and I leave it for you to suggest that he didn’t know what they were doing for him. This much is certain, the story was given out to the newspapers that dynamite had been found by the police in a shoe-box in the union headquarters. The box had been brought there by a detective, and somebody slipped up on the time, and the story was in the Boston _American_ before the raid took place and the dynamite was found! That was bad management, at least.”

The great lawyer could not help smiling. “I will say that if I had had the matter in charge, it wouldn’t have happened that way.”

“Well, don’t forget that it is a part of American labor history, and graven into the consciousness of all those people you call ‘Reds.’ So when the great gossip machine starts to grinding, and we hear that ‘people say’ our friends are guilty, that ‘everybody knows it,’ and that ‘frame-ups don’t happen,’--well, Henry, we fall back on the good old tradition of English and American law, that every man is innocent until he is proved guilty. And in the effort to get him a fair trial we go to a lot of trouble--such as inviting ourselves to lunch with our rich and famous sons-in-law, and asking for the names of lawyers who might possibly care about justice!”

V

Henry supplied the names of respectable lawyers, and Cornelia went to interview them, but in vain. Later on, after years of struggle had made a world issue of the case, it would be possible to interest great lawyers in it; but at present there was no man who would burden himself with the defense of two anarchist infidel draft-dodgers accused of murder.

Also Henry named some of the legal tricksters, and Cornelia had curious experiences interviewing these. There was one uniform objection to all these powerful ones, the amount of money necessary to start their powers into action. Some said fifty thousand, some said seventy-five; and this was a stage in the life of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when there were discussions as to whether they could afford to rent a post-office box, and whether it would be the part of wisdom to buy a second-hand typewriter.

Later on there would be ladies of wealth and fashion interested in the case, and money would be pouring in from labor groups all over the world; but at this stage, when money would really have counted, the only large sum in sight was what Cornelia could raise on her income and lend to the committee. She had discovered by talking to bankers that she could not raise very much, because her life expectancy at sixty-five was limited. If she had wanted fifty thousand dollars for an orphan asylum, or for a house to live in, or even for a string of pearls to hang about her withered neck, she had three daughters and three sons-in-law, any one of whom would have written her a check, and been glad to get such a hold upon her. But when it was a question of imperiling the Commonwealth by aiding and abetting anarchism, Cornelia did not have to ask for the money, she could hear in advance the polite but firm rebuke.

The problem of a lawyer was settled by the Italians. It happened that Lee Swenson was in New York, recuperating from the labor of saving a bunch of I.W.W. from jail in Kansas, and swearing to himself by all the gods he disbelieved in that never again. But Carlo Tresca came to see him, and Swenson knew Carlo from the Ettor-Giovannitti case. Carlo told the pitiful story of two anarchists in jail in Massachusetts, who had the skids under them, all ready to be slid into the electric chair; he told what a fine fellow Bart was, and how he had all but had tears in his eyes because he missed seeing the Statue of Liberty, and now maybe he would never see it; and about Nick’s wife and little boy, and the new baby expected in a month or two. Carlo came again and again, and appealed to Lee Swenson’s friendship, until finally he said he would go up to Boston and look things over.

Lee Swenson was of Swedish descent, and came originally from Minnesota. He had been in practically every big criminal case which involved labor during the past fifteen or twenty years. As a cub lawyer he had helped to get evidence for Moyer and Haywood in Idaho; he had helped to defend the McNamaras in Los Angeles and Tom Mooney in San Francisco, and several groups of the I.W.W. in Chicago and the middle west. He stood six feet and a couple of unnecessary inches, and was badly put together; he did not know what to do with his big hands and feet, nor in fact with any part of himself; he liked to sit on his neck, and his feet liked to get up off the floor. He had a thick shock of yellow hair, and when it was not arranged it looked as if one of those western windstorms had hit it, and when it was arranged it appeared to be done with vaseline.

Lee Swenson was too intelligent a man not to know the disturbing effect he produced upon the respectable citizens of New England. Was he really rattled by them, as he pretended, or did he enjoy the effect he produced, somewhere back in the deeps where he kept his laughter until it came rumbling forth like thunder from the mountains? After he had been nosing into the case for a couple of weeks, he asked for a conference with Cornelia, and she invited him to her little apartment to dinner, on an evening when Joe and Betty were scheduled for a hearing before the carpenters’ union. Before they went into the dining-room, Lee Swenson sank into Cornelia’s one Morris-chair, and then slid most of the way out of it, and said, “Will you be shocked if I cross my legs?”--and did it without waiting for an answer.

“Not at all,” said Cornelia, hastily.

“Not even when you discover that I wear woolen socks?”

“I know you are making fun of Boston, Mr. Swenson.”

“My God,” said he--“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Thornwell, but this is a terrible place for a man that grew up in a sod hut. I realized when we were defending Ettor and Giovannitti in Salem that I didn’t fit, but I never had time to go into details, and never happened to meet the right person. But I believe you are it.”

“Is that why you wanted to talk with me?”

“No, but you can do it on the side. Tell me how to avoid shocking judges and juries who talk through their noses.”

“Do you really want me to tell?”

“I said it.”

“Well, why do you wear a broad-brimmed black felt hat such as nobody ever saw in Boston?”

“But it’s what I had when I came to town, and I can’t afford another.”

“Are you really that hard up?”

“Maybe you don’t know how it is with a radical lawyer. Imagine a score or two of cases, each like this one. There is two dollars and fourteen cents in the treasury to-night. They offer to pay me a hundred and fifty a week while the case lasts, but you know how it will be, they’ll be seventeen weeks behind in their payments at the end of eighteen weeks, and when I get a check, there’ll be some emergency next day that I’ll pay out of my own pocket. You see, I’m not really going to be a lawyer--that will be merely incidental; I’m going to be organizer, propagandist, press agent and promoter; any money I get, I’ve first got to raise, and understanding that the committee will begrudge me every cent I take.”

“Surely it won’t be as bad as that, Mr. Swenson!”

“You are a newcomer, Mrs. Thornwell; but this is my twentieth committee, and believe me, I know them. It won’t be their fault, they will be sincere and devoted, most of them; but they will be poor, and narrow-minded--not used to spending money with the magnificent abandon of us privileged persons. They won’t see what I need with so much, and when the newspapers and the outside public begin to tell how I have got away with one or two hundred thousand on the sly, they will think maybe it’s the truth. I tell you this in advance, because, when it’s over, my one chance of getting arrears of salary will be by vamping some of the rich ladies, your friends who will be interested in the case. And then I’ll get my new hat.”

“Meantime,” said Cornelia, hastily, “you can at least get a haircut.”

But the other replied, “If I did, the hat would be bigger than ever, with nothing to hold it but my ears.”

VI

After they had dined, and were back in the little living-room, in front of the coal grate-fire, the lawyer asked if he might close the door. He drew his chair close to Cornelia, and slid down into it and began: “Mrs. Thornwell, I have been digging into this case, and I am completely baffled, and don’t know what to do. The last time I talked with Vanzetti, he told me that you were the one American he would trust. He admires your granddaughter, but he’s afraid she would be shocked if I talked straight to her.”

“He is mistaken,” said Cornelia, smiling in spite of herself. “I am far more easily shocked than Betty. The younger generation is taking life into its own hands.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I prefer the old ones. You and I have suffered, and we have a deeper foundation under us. Do you mind if I ask for your confidence?”

“Not at all, Mr. Swenson. I will tell you anything I can. But I fear it won’t be much.”

“First, all you know about these two boys--everything that will help me to judge them.”

“Sacco I hardly know at all. I only met him two or three times prior to the arrest. I have been to see him three times in Dedham, partly because I wanted to make up my mind about him.”

“And what are your conclusions?”

“He is a difficult man to know, under the circumstances. He has a primitive mind, I judge. He does very little thinking; he is satisfied with a formula, that the rich exploit the poor, and are the enemies of the poor, and always have a self-seeking motive in relation to them. And of course I don’t fit into that formula. Why should a rich woman, who might have everything she wants, burn up gasoline and tires traveling down to Dedham to visit an anarchist in prison? He is instinctively polite, and affectionate to his friends, I am told. He hasn’t given me any hint of a suspicion, but he probably fears that I may be another trap the enemy has set for him. You know, of course, they put a spy in the cell next to him soon after his arrest?”

“Yes, he told me that.”

“Also they wanted to get one into his home, to try to board with his wife. I’m told the district attorney had that bright idea. I suppose it is too much to expect those gentry to have delicate sensibilities, but you’d think they might have guessed that a woman who was deprived of her husband, and was expecting another baby in two or three months, would rather have a woman-boarder than a man. Anyhow, somebody found out about it, and naturally the Saccos are very suspicious. So I haven’t tried to talk about the case with either of them. When I have seen Nick, I have talked about his garden, and the wonderful tomatoes he used to have--those tomatoes were like so many babies to him. I take him a bunch of chrysanthemums--they let him have flowers, though they won’t let Bart have any.”

“Oh, surely not!”

“It’s a regulation at Charlestown, I suppose that a saw or a knife might be hidden in them; or maybe drugs. I get round it by wearing one flower, and when I ask the guard if I may leave it with Bart, he is ashamed to say no. I am trying to win the hearts of all of them, because it seems to me the jailers are in jail as much as the prisoners.”

“We are all in jail, Mrs. Thornwell. Take it from one who has been playing the game twenty years--we are prisoners of the system. I walk about with a chain on my wrist, and at the other end are fastened so many lies that it seems like the population of all seven of Dante’s hells. That is a part of what I want to talk to you about.”

VII

It took Cornelia a good hour to tell the story of how she had come into the Brini home and what she had seen there. She told about Bart’s ideas and dreams, his work and his play and his personal habits. She told about the sick kitten he had refused to have killed, and the rabbits he had brought home in a sack, and kept in pens for several months--until the sorrowful realization was forced upon him that there was no earthly way to keep those creatures from getting out and gnawing the vegetables of his Catholic neighbor, Mrs. O’Dowd. She told about the lost purse he had refused to take from the policeman, and the boots he had let the poor laborer keep, and the lessons in hygiene he had given to the “riformista,” Compagno Culla--all those incidents which were destined to become Vanzetti legends, and be repeated whenever his Italian friends mentioned his name.

Also, because a lawyer had a right to the whole truth, she told him about the fights; and how the anarchist youths had come armed to the Galleani meeting, vowing to defend their hero to the death; and how Bart had got a gun and declared that he would never let himself be taken and put through the third degree.

“Now you are getting to what I want,” said Swenson. “Do you know whether that gun is the same one that he had on when he was arrested?”

“I believe he gave it away,” said Cornelia. “From what I know of him, he wouldn’t keep any piece of property as long as four years.”

“Well, I can’t get them to tell me where they got those guns; at least, I can’t get them to tell me the truth. That’s why I’m so up against it. They are afraid of me, afraid of everybody.”

“They have reason to be cautious. But won’t they take Tresca’s word for your reliability?”

“I suppose if I could get them both together with Carlo, we could come to an understanding; but as it is, they go on repeating the stories they told to the police; and their friends outside do the same. Orciani has been driving me about, looking for evidence, and I’ve been appealing to him. Do you know him?”

“Only slightly.”

“He has the courage of a man with the mind of a child: a simple Italian peasant, picked up off the countryside and dumped into the maelstrom of America. I have managed to win his affection, and he will talk to me frankly about everything in the world but this case. I point out his contradictions, but it doesn’t make any difference. It is a peculiarity of Italian anarchists that I have observed, they can go on insisting that black is white longer than any other human beings I have ever seen. But somehow it has got to be put across to them that they can’t go before a Yankee jury with those stories--it will be throwing away their lives.”

“What stories, Mr. Swenson?”

“Well, the one about what they did on the night they were arrested. I can’t get a single one of those fellows to admit to me that they were in front of the Johnson place that night; yet it’s a physical fact that any jury will see--there’s a swampy meadow on both sides of the road, and no other way for Sacco and Vanzetti to have got from the place where they admit they got off the street-car to the place where they got on again. If we’re going to save them, we’ve simply got to make a story that a jury will believe.”

There was a pause; Lee Swenson got up and went to the door that led into the dining-room, and opened it, to make sure the Negro maid was not listening. Then he came back, and when he spoke again, it was in a lower voice. “Mrs. Thornwell, I know enough about Boston to understand that you will be startled to hear me discuss the ‘making’ of stories to be presented to a jury.”

“You use what I might call an optimistic phrase, Mr. Swenson.”

“Every professional man does that when he deals with the shady parts of his job. You may know that when the fashionable ladies go to a surgeon for an abortion, he refers to it as a ‘curettage’.”

“I have three daughters,” said Cornelia, placidly. “But I thought that in this case, if we are dealing with men who are innocent--”

“You thought we might trust to the truth?”

“I admit I was that naïve.”

“Well, Mrs. Thornwell, I can only tell you--in my experience with labor frame-ups in a dozen states, I have always found it necessary to fight the devil with his own fire.”

VIII

Cornelia’s little round face wore an anxious look, and her soft brown eyes were wide open, staring at the man in front of her. She saw a big, rough-hewn face, marked by small-pox; with a lower jaw which had a way of thrusting itself up, making a deep crease on each side of the mouth. The eyes were set under shaggy yellow brows--in short it was the face of a fighting man, no product of a Back Bay drawing-room.

But somehow Lee Swenson had learned how people felt in drawing-rooms--possibly from Henry James, whom he read incessantly. “You are saying to yourself that I grew up in the wild and woolly west, Mrs. Thornwell, and things are different in Massachusetts. But I assure you it is one system, from Maine to California, when some radical is accused of violence in the class struggle. The authorities are sure the man is guilty, if not of this crime, then of others just as bad, and so to ‘make’ a case against him is a worthy work. When a class-war trial begins, you will see on the stand police officers who know that it is part of their job to swear to whatever the chief tells them; and maybe an ex-convict, who knows that the prosecution has something on him, and testifies as a condition of getting off; and a prostitute, who carries on her ancient profession at the discretion of the police. In this case there will be workers from that shoe factory, semi-morons, incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, but knowing what a reward is, and having rehearsed a lesson until they can say it in their sleep. It will be simple and easy--‘Yes, I saw the bandits, I saw them shoot, I am positive these are the men.’ These witnesses will sit with Sacco and Vanzetti in front of them, and when they are asked to describe the bandits, they will describe the men in front of them, and what could be more convincing?”

“I attended the Plymouth trial,” said Cornelia. “I was shocked by its unfairness, but I hated to believe it was a deliberate frame-up.”

Said Lee Swenson: “My knowledge of your Massachusetts procedure was got at the Ettor-Giovannitti trial, seven years ago, as perfect a frame-up as ever came under my eyes. The men were no more guilty of murder than I was; every particle of the testimony was ‘made,’ and the whole case prepared and the indictments drawn up by lawyers of great corporations. The victims were Italians, I.W.W. leaders, efficient and dangerous--the more so because one of them was a fine poet. And how did we save their lives, Mrs. Thornwell? Was it by trusting to the truth? As a matter of fact, we had seventeen eye-witnesses to the shooting of Anna Lo Pizzo, and they absolutely insisted that it was done by a police officer, and they identified the officer; but because they were all Italians, and there were so many of them, we didn’t dare use their story, for fear the jury would think it was a frame-up! That’s how far the truth gets you in Massachusetts!”

Lee Swenson waited for Cornelia’s comment; but what could she say?

“Some day,” continued the lawyer, “I’ll tell you the inside of that story--as weird a tangle of plot and counterplot as you could want for a crime-romance. The district attorney was carrying on a political fight against William M. Wood, the head of the woolen trust, and so we were able to get hold of the checks which Wood had paid to have dynamite planted, in a frame-up against the union leaders. With that evidence in hand we practically blackmailed the executives of the woolen mills, and made them take the stand, one after another, and testify that the speeches of the strike leaders had been opposed to violence. I could name several laws of your great Commonwealth we broke in putting that job across--and if we hadn’t done it, the world would never have read ‘Arrows in the Gale,’ by Arturo Giovannitti.”

Cornelia sat staring before her, pondering this strange moral dilemma. At last she said, “I have always been taught, Mr. Swenson, that one gets a certain moral backing from telling the truth.”

“I know--I also have read Emerson; but how would it work in our courts of law? Consider Vanzetti’s trial in Plymouth. There was an alibi, as good as any one could want. The crime occurred on the day before Christmas, and everybody had something to remember--the eels. Did you accept that alibi?”

“I was absolutely convinced by it. I have been all over North Plymouth with Trando, and he showed me the places; every spot is alive to him with the memory of Bart, whom he adored. The things jump out of the child, in a way that couldn’t happen if he had had to learn them. He will interrupt a talk, ‘There is one of the houses where I took the eels, and Bart was across the street, and I had to go for change.’ He will say, ‘Under that tree he dismissed me, and gave me fifty cents for the work.’ If you knew those simple, kindly people, Mr. Swenson, you couldn’t doubt their story.”

“All right--but where does that leave your argument? You trusted to the truth with that Plymouth jury--and it got you nowhere! No, Mrs. Thornwell, we must fight the prosecution with its own weapons. We have to do the reverse of what they have done--convince ourselves that the boys are innocent, and that whatever we do to get them off is a worthy work. And then take a joy in the performance--learn to build a good alibi with the same pleasure that a novelist gets from constructing a detective story, with every detail fitting precisely, and contributing to the final result--an acquittal, and a booming reputation as a lawyer who has never lost a client.”

“Is that really what you want me to believe about your profession, Mr. Swenson?”

“In strict confidence, you understand, Mrs. Thornwell!”

“Oh, of course.”

“I want you to believe there is no other way to be a successful criminal lawyer in America; I have never heard of any man who has done it, and I do not believe it can be done. That is the game, and you either play it, or you play some other game.”

“It sounds as if it would be hard on the nerves.”

“This is America, and you know our motto, ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’ You play for high stakes, and every time it is ‘doubles or quits,’ if you understand the slang of the gambler. Win the big case and you’re on top of the heap; lose it, and you’re a dead one! That’s why it’s so foolish of me to take a case like this. There is no way to win except to make a big public splurge; and then, if I don’t make good, it is back to the sticks for me. That is the real moral problem that confronts a radical lawyer, Mrs. Thornwell--can he afford to have a heart? Can he feel sorry for some hero-soul like your Bart, who has apparently got into a jam not of his own making? It’s a decision I have to make, and naturally it depends very largely upon Bart’s friends.”

There was a pause. “Just what is it you want me to say, Mr. Swenson?”

“For the present, nothing in particular. That may come later. What I want is for you to know the situation--what a murder trial is, and how it has to be fought--so that later on, when you find out about this detail and that, you won’t be horrified and disgusted with me, and draw out and leave me alone with the Italians.”

IX

Lee Swenson had said his say, and it was up to Cornelia. She sat with her two hands locked together, and her eyes closed, and only the trembling of the lids to tell what was going on within. When at last she spoke, her voice was weak, and so were her words. “I never had anything like that put up to me in my life, Mr. Swenson.”

“I can believe that. Your life has been lived among people who are not accused of crimes. And you have your strict moral code--which doesn’t allow for perjury!” Then, seeing a trace of tears in the old lady’s eyes, he added quickly, “I fear that I misunderstood you in one way, Mrs. Thornwell--I thought you knew more about your great moral city than apparently you do. You went to consult Larry Shay about this case, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?”

“Well, I have sources of information. How did you come to go to him?”

“My son-in-law, Henry Cabot Winters, named him.”

“Why did he name him?”

“He said he would be the best man to get the boys off.”

“And what happened when you went to see him?”

“He wanted fifty thousand dollars, and I told him we didn’t have it.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he pointed out that it was a capital case, and would mean a lot of hard work.”

“What did you understand by that?”

“Wasn’t it obvious? It will take a lot of time to prepare the case, and it may be a long trial.”

Lee Swenson laughed, one of those polite laughs which he kept inside him, out of consideration for Boston. “You are much too good, my dear Nonna! I think I will call you by Bart’s name, if you don’t mind, because it is friendly, and at the same time respectful.”

“I don’t mind,” said Cornelia.

“Out west,” said the other, “they call me Lee, and they don’t wait a whole lifetime, as they do in Boston. But now let me explain about Larry Shay: if he had taken the case, there wasn’t going to be any trial.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that Larry is the official ‘fixer’ for the political ring which governs Boston and its environs. If you have committed a crime, and got caught, your friends go to him to find out what it will cost to have the case dropped.”

“Oh, Mr.--Lee!”

“You, lovely and naïve blue-blood lady, carried to this legal shark a proposition to bribe some of the prosecuting officials of your state, and he made you an offer, and you didn’t even know what it was about!”

“Do you really know all that?”

“Everybody knows it that knows about the insides of this town. Worse than that--they ‘make’ the cases, for the purpose of collecting blackmail. I could tell you quite a number of stories, only they are not fit for a lady’s ears--having to do with women and road-houses.”

There was a pause, while Cornelia thought hard. “You mean, Lee Swenson, that if I raise fifty thousand dollars and pay it to these politicians, I can have the case against our two boys dropped?”

“I mean exactly that. And there’s another moral problem for a blue-blood lady who has lived a sheltered life, and listened to her husband, the governor, make fine speeches about their noble Commonwealth!”

X

The telephone rang; Betty calling. She and Joe had had a successful time at the carpenters’ union, had got a twenty-five dollar contribution. Now Betty was going somewhere else. She could not explain over the phone, but she would be late, and Grannie was not to wait up for her. Go to sleep. She hung up, and Lee Swenson took his departure, saying that he had put enough burdens upon her mind for one evening. He would not ask anything definite, she would need time to think matters over. Cornelia thanked him.

She did not go to sleep, but sat in the Morris chair which the lawyer had vacated, and moral whirlwinds seized her thoughts and flung them this way and that. She, Cornelia Thornwell, widow of the sternest governor that Massachusetts had had for a century, the most ruthless punisher of lawbreakers and corruptionists--she had sat in this room and listened to a proposition that she should conspire to commit perjury! Yes, that was it, no use mincing words. She had heard, and from now on would be accessory before the fact to whatever might be done! She had not risen and denounced the proposer and ordered him from her home; no, she had hesitated--which in itself was guilt--and when he had told her it was confidential, she had assented, which was double guilt!

Punishment for Cornelia Thornwell, feminist and suffragist! Now she knew what the wise men had meant when they told her that woman’s place was the home! Woman’s place was the Sewing Circle, where they made long flannel petticoats which the poor would not wear! Woman’s place was the Parish House of Trinity Church in the City of Boston, where perfect ladies gathered to arrange for visitation of the sick and care of widows and orphans! If a lady insisted on going out into the harsh and wicked world, this was what she ran into--perjury, subornation of perjury, conspiracy to commit perjury! Cornelia saw these awful phrases in the headlines of all the newspapers of Boston.

The soul of Bartolomeo Vanzetti came to keep watch with her, and share her worries. Bart did not sleep soundly in his prison cell; he lay awake and brooded over the case, and thought of letters to write, and suggestions to make to friends and lawyers. So now he came in spirit, and Cornelia asked him all those questions she would never ask in the flesh. What did he want her to do? What would best serve his cause, the “joostice” for which he lived?

She questioned her own soul. What was right, what was wrong? To stand by the stern moral code of Puritan Boston--which all of them preached, and some of them practiced? Say that the law was sacred, and an oath was binding before God, and it was better for men to die than to break God’s law? Easy to say that, when it concerned yourself; something in you would take pleasure in dying for a code. But when it was some other man’s life, did you have the right to force your code upon him?

Vanzetti had proved that he did not subscribe to that code, because he had told lies to the police. But then, he faced the same problem as Cornelia; it wasn’t for himself that he lied, but for others. Sometime previously Cornelia had put to him a very grave question. There appeared to be much more evidence against Sacco than against him, so it might be wise to demand separate trials, and save at least one of them. But Bart had turned the idea down without a moment’s hesitation. “Save Nick, he got the wife and kids!” That was his attitude, from first to last.

Something easy to understand--to lie for a wife and kids! In contrast with that, Cornelia’s ideal seemed far-off, cold and aloof. In this world truth was a luxury, denied to all but the fastidious, the ivory-tower personalities, who had no hearts and no sympathies! Who were good at shutting their eyes and refusing to know uncomfortable facts!

Cornelia thought over Lee Swenson’s statement, that her life had been lived among people who were not accused of crimes. A careful and lawyer-like phrase! Not those who did not commit crimes, but those who were not accused! Cornelia searched her memory, and forced herself to face reality. Did her sort of people really refuse to lie? The case of Jerry Walker leaped to her mind, because she had just been talking to her son-in-law about it. Had Rupert and Henry lied to Jerry Walker, in order to get his property away from him? Of course they had! Henry had even lied to Cornelia, and treated it as a matter of course. They had lied to their associates, and their associates were now accusing them of it--so Cornelia had learned from family gossip.

Sooner or later Rupert and Henry were going upon the witness-stand, to be cross-questioned as to what they had done. Were they going to admit their conspiracy to take ten million dollars’ worth of property from Jerry Walker? Were they going to say that the law was sacred, and that an oath was binding before God? Of course they were not! What they were going to do was to follow the Lee Swenson formula--sit down with their lawyers and frame up an elaborate story, learn every detail of it by heart, and go upon the witness-stand and lie like troopers--or, in the modern equivalent, like policemen who know that it is part of their job to swear to whatever the chief tells them! Rupert and Henry would do that, and all State Street would know they were doing it, and take it as a good joke, nothing worse.

XI

A world of lies, a world run on the basis of lies, so that when you talked about truth-telling you were a Utopian and a dreamer; worse yet, a traitor to your friends, to your business associates, your family, your class! A fastidious person, an ivory-tower esthete, preferring your own peace of mind to the rights of those who had taken you into their confidence, assuming that you would play the game as everybody else played it, for your profit and comfort as well as their own!

Lies! Lies! It was the autumn of the year 1920, and a great political campaign was at its climax; America had ceased to be a republic, it was an absolute monarchy, its ruler the Prince of Lies! That little man, “Silent Cal,” whom Cornelia knew so well as governor of the Commonwealth, was being elected vice-president of the United States by a lie! He who had run away from the police-strike was being rewarded for breaking the police-strike! His backers had managed to suppress the report of the citizens’ committee, which had worked so hard to avoid a strike, and had told the whole truth; instead, they had made a nursery-legend, such as the pious Parson Weems had invented about George Washington and the cherry-tree!

And worse yet, look at the man they were making president! Cornelia’s mind was a witch’s caldron, with the tales Joe Randall brought home; for Joe knew the newspaper men, and picked up the gossip which could not be printed, and used it to spice the meals he ate in the little apartment. Joe’s mind had turned rancid, after four months’ contact with American morals and American justice; he found his pleasure in believing the most shocking things about the great and noble persons of the land. This Senator Harding, who was to be the next president, had been picked out by the oil-men, who were planning to loot the oil-reserves of the nation; he was handsome and dignified, a magnificent statesman, when you read about him in the capitalist newspapers--but Joe called him an old booze-fighter, a small-town rake, whose idea of entertainment was to sit in his shirt-sleeves and chew tobacco and play poker all night with his cronies, “the Ohio gang.” His managers had had to get a newspaper man to write his speeches for him, because, when he was turned loose for himself, he used polysyllables like a Negro preacher, with no idea what they meant.

And worse yet, he traveled round the country with a young girl who was his mistress! He stayed in rooms in various cheap hotels with her, and when the house-detectives ventured to object, he would present them with his card! It was something entirely new in American history, and Joe Randall turned his fancy loose to play with the theme; some day, he said, the American people would build a memorial to this oil-statesman, and when the radicals came into power they would carve an inscription across the front of it, and set it with flaming red rubies: “Nan Britton’s Boy!”

XII

A cruel, cruel world! Impossible to live in a place where such wickedness was done! A sudden weariness seized Cornelia, a failing of the heart; it was time for her to quit, to move on and leave the world to a new generation, which had stronger nerves and could face such issues. The runaway grandmother would run back to shelter.

The fire in the grate had burned nearly out, and the room was growing cold, the chill creeping into the bones of the old woman sitting in the chair. She looked at the clock; it was after two in the morning, and suddenly she realized that Betty had not come home. What could the child be doing at that hour?

Lee Swenson had asked her not to tell Betty about these problems. But that was hardly fair. Betty had come to be her mainstay--she realized it all of a sudden. Betty was young, Betty was not afraid, Betty could face any facts there were! To try to hide anything from her would be one more deception, in a world which seemed to be made of nothing else.