Chapter XII: Shadows Before

I

Springtime in New England! Not all the giant factories with belching smoke, not all the dingy tenements, billboards, hot-dog stands and filling stations could conceal the fact that something magical was happening to the land. Even to prisoners in jail, there was a difference in the air which crept through the corridors. Just as boys know when to fly kites, with no outsider to remind them--so Nick Sacco knew it was time for the garden to be spaded, and when you went to see him, he would ask who was going to do it, and what was to be planted. It was good form to insist that he would be out in time to weed the garden, and to eat the first tomatoes.

Vanzetti, who spent fifteen and a half hours in a cell with only a slit in the top for light, and worked in a yard blackened with coal dust and smoke of near-by factories--even he knew that it was spring. You took a bunch of mayflowers when you went to see him, and the guard could not refuse to let you give him one. A pitiful thing, a frail blossom, but--“flower in the crannied wall”--it was a symbol, it meant a whole springtime; it meant those beautiful woods about Plymouth, and the walks which Bart had taken with Nonna and the children. “How happy we been, Nonna! We not know what happiness we have, till we los-èd him!”

He would talk about the things they had done and seen; it was all alive in his memory, it came like a vision, shining with a light that never was in any springtime. He fed his soul upon such memories, lying through the long hours in his cage. Friendship, kindness, beauty--he had had these “blassings” in his life; not a full share--but then, he had observed that people who had a full share did not appreciate so much their “blassings.” “Plenty people go in sunshine, they not think. But I got little time for seeing, I make notice!” He would move nearer to the window.

Betty had occasion to go to Plymouth, and she brought back Beltrando Brini in her car with her. Another kind of springtime, a musical talent putting forth buds! The little boy came to the prison, and after Cornelia had interceded with the warden, he was brought into the big reception room, and unlimbered his fiddle and tuned it up. Bart sat watching every move, bursting with pride, as if he were the child’s mother. Trando was scared, of course, for he was only thirteen and a half, and this was a terrible place, slouchy brown figures gliding here and there, watchers with hard faces and eyes. But he tucked the fiddle under his chin, and quavering notes stole on the air--“When you and I were young, Maggie”--the tune which Bart had heard him struggling to play, back in those happy days at home!

He had learned other tunes now--“Old Black Joe,” and “Home, Sweet Home.” He could almost play Drdla’s “Serenade”--he would try it, if Bart would excuse mistakes; Bart sat with tears running down his cheeks, no use trying to hide them. The convicts stole to the doors of their cells and strained their ears; even the hard-faced keepers listened, and were reminded suddenly that they, too, were in jail, victims of the hatreds they themselves engendered. All the prison drew together, realizing its shame; the steel bars were melted--and the harder and tougher moods which had made the steel. Oh, man, how strange a fate--to make jails for yourself, and be led out by a little child with a magic wand--and then find yourself afraid, and obliged to run back and shut yourself in! A clock struck, and visitors must leave, and magic cease.

II

Such holidays of the spirit were rare in the life of Cornelia and Betty these days. For the most part their talk was about harsh reality. The trial loomed near, a portentous event, a battle of armies; no longer a mere matter of two wops accused of crime, but a contest over the good name and dignity of the august Commonwealth. A lawyer had come from the wild west and opened an office and started a propaganda campaign, slandering the good name of Massachusetts all over the world. He was raising tens of thousands of dollars--no one could say how much, but they guessed high, and every dollar was a separate outrage and insult; a refusal to play the game according to the rules.

Lee Swenson knew the danger into which he had put his clients by the De Falco procedure, and this thought was a goad which gave him no rest. He was a cyclone of energy; writing circulars, or suggesting ideas for others to write; printing appeals, getting lists for mailing, writing to this person and that, to get information, to pull wires for publicity, money, or support; interviewing witnesses, hunting up new ones, probing this or that detail of their lives. He would come out to dine with Cornelia, and sit in her big Morris chair by the window, and fan himself and sigh with exhaustion; but in a few minutes he would be telling about a new idea, and before long something else would pop into his head, and out would come his notebook, and what was supposed to be a memorandum might turn into a new set of campaign plans.

Another lawyer had come, a friend of Swenson’s from the west; Fred Moore, an Irishman, but a radical, and Swenson’s aide in many a fight. Also there were two more journalists on the staff, John Nicholas Beffel and Eugene Lyons, devoted young fellows, passionately convinced of the justice of the cause, and writing newspaper and magazine stuff that went all over the world. As an investigator, there was Bob Reid, a Boston constable, gray old veteran who had been through the Ettor-Giovannitti case with Swenson, and could follow the trail of the authorities like an Indian hunter. If there was anything about Massachusetts police practice too dreadful for Cornelia to believe, all she had to do was to ask this man, and he would cauterize her doubts.

And then another figure, still more alarming to a lady who had lived a sheltered life; a figure out of the underworld, furtive-eyed, silent--a man whom Swenson or Moore usually saw alone, and with whom they made mysterious appointments. Lee, it appeared, was going to try the “stool pigeon” methods of the authorities. Somebody had actually committed the South Braintree crime, he insisted, and the Bridgewater one, too; the way to nail down the prosecution was to find the guilty men. A rumor had come to Lee that in a city not far away from Boston there was a gang of real bandits who were driving an automobile which they called, jeeringly, “Sacco’s car.” Now the lawyers were spending money to trail this gang, and Cornelia began to hear whispers of dread names. Lee Swenson saw himself playing the “lead” in a fifth act, in which the prosecution would be confronted with the real evidence, so overwhelming that truth would be vindicated and justice done.

Lee was much of a boy, in spite of his forty years, and he managed to communicate this excitement to Betty and Joe and Cornelia. But he found it impossible to get the Italians of the committee to share his idea; as in the De Falco case, it was contrary to “filosofia anarchica.” When you argued about it, you would meet shrugs of the shoulders; let the cops do their own dirty work. “We no raise money for sooch job.” When you declared that here might be real bandits, there would be a still higher shrug of the shoulders, a wider sweep of the hands. “What if they did? Is poor feller, musta live. Is victim of wicked sistema, what right I got for punish?”

And when you took the question to Bart and Nick, you met exactly the same response. They would not be saved at the expense of any other human being; they would not compromise their principles, even to prove their innocence. The business of anarchists was to end the system of exploitation, after which crime would cease of itself. If you could live according to these principles, all right, then live; if you could not, then it was up to you to die. Such stubbornness was embarrassing to persons of Yankee upbringing, who believed in adjusting means to ends, and took “law and order” seriously. Also embarrassing to a lawyer, who had spent twenty years training himself to play a certain game, and now was expected to play it and not play it at the same time!

III

Day by day, as the work continued, the intricacies of the case developed. The list of witnesses for the prosecution numbered more than fifty, those for the defense close to one hundred. There were not investigators enough to run down all the clews, there were not cells enough in the human brain to hold all the details. The crime had occurred in mid-afternoon, on a busy street, and there were many witnesses, each one a separate problem; the more you dug into him or her, the more extra problems you would discover--husbands, wives, sweethearts, children, employers--to say nothing of policemen and investigators and prosecuting officials who had been there before you! The witnesses were mostly persons of low social station, the neglected poor of America. To probe into their lives, to uncover their family skeletons, their vices and secret shames, their greeds and fears and vanities and hates--it seemed to Cornelia there was nothing so horrible being done in all the world. Except, perhaps, the work which a large force of Americans, guided by sentimentality and superstition, were now performing in France; digging up the dead bodies of soldier boys who had been slain in battle, and had been rotting underground for three years.

Take the soul of Lola Andrews. Cornelia lived with the soul of Lola Andrews for months, walked, talked, ate, slept, dined or fasted with Lola Andrews; because Betty took Lola for her task, consecrating her youth and beauty, her social charm, her faith, hope and charity, to the task of trying to persuade Lola to tell the truth. Naturally Betty, being new at the practice of psychopathology, not very well informed as to the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria, paranoia, hyperesthesia and all abnormalities, would bring her problems to Grannie, and the two would hold long consultations, and Cornelia would visit the famous Dr. Morrow and ask his advice.

Lola Andrews had begun life in the wilderness of Maine, as the hapless child of an Italian man and a Yankee farmer’s daughter. Her mother died, her father disappeared, and she grew up, slim and small, black of eyes and hair, a kind of woodland sprite, used to the sneers of the world. At the age of seventeen, when she was married, her hair was such a mat of filth and vermin that her husband had been compelled to take her to a barber and have her head shaved close. This husband was a soldier returned from the Philippines; after a child was born, Lola began running out to dances, and he left her. During years of misery she made the discovery that by screaming and crying she could get people to pay attention to her; so she became an hysteric, and at any time during the investigation, if anything happened that Lola didn’t like, up would go her hands and forth would come a shriek. After which, she would calm down, and talk quite reasonably about her own interests.

At the time of the South Braintree crime Lola had been taking care of an elderly man who was bedridden, in the hope that he would leave her a part of his property at his death. Meantime, since he gave her nothing, she scrubbed floors, she went out and did washing--and of course was preyed upon. The police of the town knew about her life, yet in this case they would be willing to make use of her.

It was Lola’s story that she had been walking down the street, four hours prior to the crime, and had twice passed what she thought was the bandit car. It was a great weakness of the prosecution that the crime had taken place at such speed, there had been only a minute or so for observation; but here was Lola, who had stopped and chatted with the bandits. One of the two men standing by the car was yellow-haired--and when Joe Randall heard this part of the story he said, “Look out, Lee Swenson, they are after you!” The other man had been under the car, doing something to the works, and this was the one Lola had made a special point to observe, and was willing to describe in any way that seemed most to the advantage of Lola.

So here was a problem in applied psychology; to explore the dark caverns of this tortured soul, to know more about her than she knew about herself, so that you could pull the strings and manipulate her to the ends of “joostice.” But alas, it was easier to dream than to accomplish; the science of psychopathology is still in its infancy, and the few months’ time allowed was insufficient to bring it to maturity. Lola would have moods of frankness; she was nearing forty now, her charms were gone, she was a poor wreck, and this was her chance to get what was coming to her; the world was a place of “dog eat dog,” and why should she worry about a pair of wops who would never worry about her? Why should she worry about what she had said at preliminary hearings, or to newspaper reporters, or investigators, or any of the other people who had pestered her? All she had to do was deny it, and the district attorney would protect her, and the jury would believe her.

There was a secret spring by which the soul of Lola might be moved, but alas, the defense did not find it until after the trial. The fates so willed it, that everything that was really significant in the Sacco-Vanzetti case was not found until after the trial. Lola’s son was living up in Maine, under another name, and in the effort to keep his esteem, she would make sacrifices--for a few days. When confronted with this son, and his reminder of other cases where she had “staged a show,” Lola broke down and admitted that she had lied, and that her identification had been “framed.” She made affidavit to this in the presence of her son and several reliable witnesses. But under police pressure, she took it all back, and made another affidavit, with a lurid tale about how the defense had intimidated her. Subsequently she took that back also.

Such was Lola Andrews, who sat in the witness chair at the trial, and identified Sacco as the “dark-complexioned man” who had been under the car, and identified the car as the bandit car because, “when I heard of the shooting I somehow associated the man I saw at the car.” And when the defense started to question her about her past life, she suddenly threw her much-tried fainting stunt, and Judge Thayer hastened to adjourn court. When she was asked the cause of her excitement, she said it was because she had recognized in the court-room a man who had assaulted her in a toilet in Quincy! And Judge Thayer, who had no more training in psychopathology than Cornelia and Betty, ordered all the doors of the court-room closed, while the officers attempted to catch the man whom Lola had recognized. Never had she had so much attention, never had she been such a heroine!

Along with this problem came Mrs. Campbell, the elderly woman who had been with Lola on the day of the crime, and had gone into the shoe factory with her to seek a job. It took fancy detective work to locate Mrs. Campbell, because she was not listed by the prosecution; when she was found, the reason was apparent--she completely wiped Lola out. The man they had spoken to was not the man under the car at all, but a man in khaki clothes standing near the factory; neither of them had spoken to any man who was working on an automobile. An investigator for the government had come to Mrs. Campbell, and hearing her story, had assured her there was no need for her to come to Dedham to testify, what she knew was of no importance, and it would cost too much money to bring her. It would have added ten or twenty dollars to the seventy thousand which the great Commonwealth was spending to put two wops out of the way.

A topsy-turvy world, a lunatic’s dream of a world, impossible to believe in, even when you saw it with your eyes and heard it with your ears! What could you make of a world in which you studied Lola Andrews for months, and came to know every quirk of her fantastic soul; in which you saw her exposed and discredited by witness after witness--even a policeman and a newspaper reporter to whom she had admitted that she did not see the faces of the men she thought were the bandits; and then, in the face of all this, you saw the Honorable Fred Katzmann, district attorney of Norfolk County, stand up to address the jury, and solemnly declare: “I have been in this office, gentlemen, for now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too long service for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews!”

IV

And then Carlos Goodridge! This man, the manager of a small music store, had happened to be in a pool-room near the scene of the crime. There were four other men in the room, and none of them had got a glimpse of the bandits, and to these others Goodridge had admitted that he could not identify the bandits. “If I have got to say who the man was, I can’t say.” But seven months later Goodridge and his wife were in court, charged with stealing several hundred dollars of money and goods from the music store. It so happened that Sacco was there at the same time, pleading to some motion, and Goodridge saw his opportunity, and told the authorities that he recognized Sacco and could identify him as one of the South Braintree bandits. Could a deal have been made? Impossible to say; but the case was “placed on file”--that is to say, Goodridge did not have to serve the sentence for his crime, but took the witness stand and swore to the guilt of another man.

And here was Lee Swenson, insisting to Cornelia and Betty and Joe that the prosecution would be able to “get away” with that! Judge Thayer would find some trick of the law to bar all testimony to the effect that Goodridge had a sentence hanging over him; he would send the jurors from the room while the matter was argued, so they would never know they were listening to a criminal. Lee insisted that the only hope would be to “get something else” on that fellow! Lee’s instinct, what he called his “smell for crime,” told him that Goodridge had been in jail. But where? And how to prove it?

It was a matter to which the lawyer hung on with bulldog grip; they must follow this clew and that, they must get more investigators, spend more money. But they had only a few weeks, and the right clew came too late! After the trial they knew all about Carlos Goodridge--his real name was Erastus Corning Whitney, which in itself meant that he had committed perjury when he testified against Sacco. He had served terms in Elmira Reformatory and in Auburn State Prison, New York, and was now wanted in that state for grand larceny. He had had a number of wives, and Swenson collected a string of affidavits from these ladies, setting forth his habits of marrying under various names, of stealing everything in sight, and of lying freely. One added that he had been attacked by Italians whom he had cheated of their belongings, and had borne a grudge against Italians ever since.

Too late! Too late! The curse that lay upon the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that everything came too late! When the only thing you could do was to make another motion before Webster Thayer, and have that just and upright judge respond, “Motion denied!” Lee Swenson and one of his men tracked “Goodridge” to the little village of Vassalboro, Maine, and confronted him with his record, and he held out his wrists for the handcuffs. Later they had him arrested, but--strange solidarity of the rulers of America--New York State did not want him now, could not be persuaded to take him! When once a criminal has obliged the police in any part of the country, he has become a member of the gang, and is immune.

And stranger yet, the august judiciary will rally to his defense, and not permit him to be slandered by having his criminal record exposed! Webster Thayer, a Daniel come to judgment, would hand down his decision on the motion for a new trial, rebuking the defense for its pursuit of Goodridge, and saying that he had done right to resist a lawyer’s efforts to intimidate him. “Motion denied!”

V

Too late! Too late! Several times, in the midst of investigations for South Braintree, they turned up evidence concerning the earlier case. Evidence which would have saved poor Bart, if only it could have been got to the jury! New witnesses--Yankee witnesses--who had seen the Bridgewater shooting, and declared that the bandits did not look like Vanzetti! Witnesses who had stated this to the police, and been told to go home and keep quiet! Now this case was legally dead; Vanzetti’s friends could not even have the poor pleasure of bringing the new evidence to the attention of Judge Thayer. No matter what happened at the coming trial, Bart would stay in Charlestown prison fourteen more years--save in the unlikely event that Massachusetts might elect a governor with a heart.

So now Cornelia heard those ghostly voices which on past occasions had shouted to her in vain! If only she had waited until that family which was away from home had come back! If only she had turned up this street instead of that! And of course these vain regrets brought terrors for the future; Cornelia and her friends began to hear, far off and faint, the ghostly voices warning them about the new case. They were like enchanted people in an old-time legend, living halfway between two worlds, holding communion with both. Lee Swenson, sitting in Cornelia’s big chair, with his chin in his hand and his heavy brows knitted in thought, became some medieval magician, wrestling with spirits and demons he challenged, but could not command.

_Creature of Flame, thou shalt not daunt me!
’Tis I! ’Tis Faust! Thy peer I vaunt me!_

Many things this new Faustus demanded of the “busy spirit that ranges round the world.” Find the man with a bullet hole in his overcoat! Again and again this clew turned up; there had been a man by the name of Roy Gould, who had been fired upon by the bandits, and the bullet had pierced his coat. But nobody knew this man’s address. Manifestly, the police would not have overlooked such a witness; and the fact that he was not listed by them made it sure that he had failed to identify Sacco and Vanzetti. Presently it was learned that he was a salesman of shaving paste; some one reported that he was in the habit of selling his wares to crowds at circuses and fairs, so it was a question of getting a list of all the circuses in New England!

Like all others, this mystery was solved too late. The man turned up, several months after the trial. The bandit car had passed within five or ten feet of him, and the bandit who was supposed to be Sacco had fired at him, and he said it could not possibly be Sacco. He would go down into history as the “Gould motion”; one of nine different appeals for a new trial, which would compel Judge Thayer to repeat nine times his celebrated formula, “Motion denied.”

Also the witnesses who were to refute Louis Pelzer, a shoe cutter and dullard who had been in the Rice and Hutchins factory when the shots were fired, and had run to the window, and then dropped down out of sight. He had really seen nothing and had so stated to many persons; but the prosecution was to get hold of him, and drill him for a star witness. Deep in the soul of this Jewish boy was a reverence for authority, the buried memories of a hundred pogroms, when his ancestors had cowered in ghetto tenements and seen whole families brained before their eyes. When a blue uniform appeared in the room, when a prosecuting official frowned upon him, something inside Louis Pelzer gave way.

So he was going to say that one of the bandits was the “dead image” of Sacco; he would learn this phrase, and repeat it as often as desired. And where were the witnesses to break him? Three of them, fellow-workers, would be found by the defense; but the most important of them would be found too late. Four months after the trial, Louis was to make an affidavit, declaring that his testimony was false, the words “dead image” had been put into his mouth by the district attorney. Six months after that, he was to take it all back, and be safe with the police again!

But most loudly the ghostly voices shouted about the Pinkerton reports. The operative “H.H.” had been on the scene immediately after the crime, and his reports wiped out the most important of all the witnesses of the prosecution, Mary Splaine. Not merely had she identified other men, but she had told stories to the Pinkerton operative which in themselves discredited her. And all this was known to the prosecution--but not a hint of it to the defense! Most amazing circumstance of all--that detective was going to attend the trial, and take the stand and testify against a defense witness! Henry Hellyer, the “operative H.H.,” came to the court-room where Mary Splaine swore away the life of Sacco, knowing what she had told him, and what he had written and turned in to his employers! The mockery of it--the devilishness of it--that prosecuting authorities would play such a trick! And the ghostly voices would shout into the ears of Cornelia and Betty and Joe, and no one of them would hear a sound! Lee Swenson might sit with his chin in his hand, and bend his brows and torture his wits all night--but the “busy spirit that ranges round the world” could never be conjured to give him a hint of that secret!

VI

There was a fatality hanging over Cornelia. She had seen it coming--no way to stop it, yet she had pushed the thought away and refused to face it. But now the trial was only a week off, and there could be no more evasion. Lee Swenson telephoned, asking if he might come to dinner that evening; he wanted to be alone with her, he said--and she knew the time had come.

Lee looked very tired; there were deep lines about his mouth, and deep shadows under his eyes, and he hardly tasted his very good dinner. For a while Cornelia managed to divert him--asking for the news. A curious development in the case, ready-made for a detective romance: from a scrubwoman whom he had befriended, Lee had learned that detectives had hired the janitor of his tumble-down office building to deliver the contents of his trash-basket every night! He knew that they had their minds fixed upon the sixteen thousand dollars which they thought Sacco had buried; so the lawyer would divert his tired mind by drawing maps of buried treasure! He made a plot of Sacco’s garden: sixteen feet north from the southwest corner, twenty-two feet east--then dig! The next time Cornelia went to Stoughton, she must find out if anybody had done so!

Dinner was over, and the maid dismissed, and the doors closed; the clouds came back to the lawyer’s face. “Nonna,” he said, “we are going to lose these boys!”

“Oh, Lee!” Cornelia’s voice almost failed her.

“They have got us sewed up in a strait-jacket.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Do you realize what lies ahead of this trial? We start on the day after Memorial Day, and then comes the anniversary of Belleau Wood, and then Bunker Hill Day, and before we get through it will be the Fourth of July! And all these dead soldier boys they are bringing home, all the weeping and praying and dedicating our lives to our country!”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“You ask me seriously? This is going to be the great peacetime service for heroes to render to the nation; a defense of our heritage against foreign anarchy and Bolshevism. And what have we got? Very few Yankee witnesses! A string of wops--worse than at Vanzetti’s trial!”

The lawyer began to count on his fingers--the scores of witnesses he had been able to find. On the day of the South Braintree crime, Bart had been selling fish, and digging clams and bait in Plymouth, and had met few Yankees. He had stopped and chatted with one Yankee fisherman--but the jury would say this fellow had got mixed up on the date. Bart had bought some cloth from a Yiddish peddler, of whom Katzmann would make a monkey. For the rest, they would have to depend upon Alfonsina and Lefevre Brini, and Antonio Carbone and Angelo Giadabone--hardly the sort of names to impress a Yankee jury!

As for Nick, he had been in Boston that day, but talked to only one American he could remember. He had had lunch with Guadagni at Boni’s restaurant, and later there had been two other Italians present; he had paid some money to an Italian grocer, and then gone to the consulate, to get his passport--but the man who waited on him there had gone back to Italy, and all they had was a deposition, not very convincing to a jury.

So much for the alibis. And then for the identifications; what perversity of fate that so many of them depended upon wops! Why did it have to be that Goodridge had been working for an Italian at the time of the crime, and that his former employer was also an Italian? And the men in the pool-room, to whom Goodridge had declared that he could not recognize the bandits! Such names as Magazu, Arrigoni, Mangoni, D’Amato! And then a bunch of men who had been working on a trench in the street when the bandit car passed; a whole gang who would testify that they had seen the bandits in the car, and that none of them resembled Sacco or Vanzetti. But what good would it do? “It’s just no use to put on a string of Italians, Nonna--three are better than thirty, because you bore the jury and get them cross. Fred Katzmann will make some playful remark--‘What is this, a Columbus Day parade?’--and after that the jury will never stop smiling.”

There was a long silence. “Remember, Nonna, this means death for both of them. There is no middle ground.”

“I know it, Lee.”

“And if we don’t win the verdict, don’t fool yourself about the future. Remember, so long as Web Thayer lives, he stays the boss of this case; the supreme court of Massachusetts has seldom reversed a verdict in a capital case--only two or three times in its entire history. So it’s now or never.”

“I know, Lee.” Cornelia’s voice was faint.

Again a silence. The lawyer’s somber look was fixed upon her, and she could not meet it.

“Do you really want to save those boys, Nonna?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then why don’t you do it? Why not testify for them?”

“You told me you couldn’t use character witnesses.”

“I don’t mean that sort of witness, Nonna. I mean, why don’t you let me fix you up a story, about how you went down to Plymouth on April fifteenth of last year, and spent the day with the Brinis, and had lunch with Bart, and later walked on the beach and saw him digging clams? That’s the way to win this case, Nonna; it will end right there--a knockout!”

VII

What was it--some instinct buried deep in Cornelia Thornwell, something in the very fiber of her being, that made it necessary for her to be shocked by these words--even though the idea had been haunting her mind for months? Nothing really new that Lee Swenson could say to her--yet she had to let him say it, and act as if she had never thought of it! “Oh, Lee, I couldn’t do it!”

“Why couldn’t you? Did you really never tell a lie?”

“Never one like that!”

“Little ones, Nonna, for little occasions. But this is a big occasion! This is life or death!”

Again a pause. When the lawyer resumed, his voice was grim, and he dropped the playful nickname. “I am not going to try to put pressure on you, Mrs. Thornwell, as I have on other witnesses in my life; for after all, it is your case--Bart is your friend, far more than he is mine, and why should I want to save him more than you?”

“Don’t put it that way, Lee!”

“But that is the way to put it! You have your friends, and you have your principles, and you must weigh them, and decide which you value more. We all have to make such choices--Bart made one, you remember, he lied for his friends. Those lies he told in the police-station were to save Boda and Orciani from sharing the fate of Salsedo. He will tell a different story on the witness stand, and whether it is the truth or not--judge for yourself!”

Another pause. “What is it, Mrs. Thornwell? Have you religious scruples about an oath? Do you believe God will blast you to eternity if you save these boys from the electric chair?”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Is it patriotism? Do you think it will help your country to let a bunch of crooks kill a pair of idealists, as a means of frightening the others?”

“No, not that.”

“Then it’s just a matter of good form? It’s that you are a lady, and such things are not done!”

“No, not that, either. As a matter of fact, they are done all the time. My sons-in-law are lying in business, and they will lie on the stand to back each other up.”

“Exactly!” And to himself Lee Swenson thought, “She has been debating it with herself!” Aloud he said, “What is it, Mrs. Thornwell?”

“It is just--I wouldn’t know how to do it!”

“But if that is all that troubles you, here’s a thoroughly qualified expert to take charge. Put yourself in my hands, as if it were a surgical operation, and I’ll guarantee we’ll have Nick on the street before the Fourth of July, and we’ll start a move to get Bart pardoned!”

“But Lee, how could I do such a thing?”

“If you mean it as a technical question, nothing more simple: you take the stand and swear that you were in Plymouth that day, and you recite the details of some other day when you were actually there. It can all be worked out, very easily. You were in the habit of going there off and on, nobody can dispute that. You remember the date, because of something that happened the day before or the day after. Perhaps there was a concert you had just been to, or there was to be one, and you had to leave in order to attend it. We can go back and find a public event to tie to; or perhaps you have a diary, or some letters.”

“But suppose I did something in Boston on that day?”

“There’ll be a way to get round it. You understand that, according to your story, you only had to remember back three weeks. As soon as you heard Bart was arrested, you naturally looked back, and realized that you had been with him the day of the crime. But anybody who is going to refute you has got to begin now, and remember back a year--which isn’t apt to happen. If they have documentary evidence, like a letter--well, the trial will be over a day or two after you testify. There might be a scandal among your friends, but nothing serious, and anyhow, the boys will be free--you understand that when a jury has acquitted them, they can’t ever be tried for South Braintree again.”

VIII

Lee kept his promise not to put pressure on her. What he did was to go over the case, telling what each government witness would testify, and just how that testimony had been “made.” As a piece of prophecy it was a miracle, but Lee claimed no occult powers. With bitterness he said, “If I want to know what the other side is doing, I figure what I would do myself.”

He had talked with some of these witnesses; others, who had refused to talk to him, had become the subject of “reports.” So he knew their motives, and how they would be controlled. When there had been need of “rough stuff,” the police had done it. The more subtle work had been done by college-bred gentlemen of the district attorney’s office, who had learned to manufacture in weaker minds like Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin what the psychologists term a “false memory.” They would take these women to the jail again and again and show them Sacco and Vanzetti; they would present pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, insisting that these were the bandits, these were the men whom the women had seen in the bandit car; until in the women’s minds the prison memories and the photograph memories became superposed upon the bandit memories, so completely merged with them that they could no longer be separated.

There were a thousand tricks that successful prosecuting officials knew. They stood in with the political ring, they could promise favors--contracts and business, a job for a man who needed it, immunity from trouble with the police. “I am a friend of Mr. Jones, in the district attorney’s office”--such a statement would tear up an auto tag, or suppress a liquor charge any day. “It is what we call power,” said Lee Swenson, “and those who hold it know how to use it.”

Like Virgil, leading Dante through successive stages of the infernal regions, Lee Swenson conducted the widow of Governor Thornwell into the interior of the Boston “ring.” He knew the way, because in the Ettor-Giovannitti case he had had these forces to deal with, and other lawyers associated with the case had “put him wise.” Indeed, the factional quarrels in the political gang had been such that one side had betrayed the other, and Lee had seen documents that would have entitled leading statesmen to spend the rest of their days in Charlestown prison. When you had listened to his stories for an hour or two, you understood Lola Andrews’ statement that it was “dog eat dog”; you forgot the Emersonian notion of making truth count in Boston!

Cornelia, probing her own soul, confessed to a certain snobbery in her attitude toward perjury. It was a thing she associated with foreigners accused of crime, and with Irish politicians. The City Hall belonged to the Irish, so it was called the “steal works”; but the State House with its golden dome was run by gentlemen, and was a sacred spot. Now, however, Lee Swenson declared there was ten times as much graft in the State House--the only difference was that it was legalized; such things as fixing up laws to enable great corporations to plunder the public. There under the golden dome you would encounter a blue-blood banker who wanted his attorney made into a supreme court judge, so that the banker would be safe forever after; or a state bank commissioner who wanted to become president of a bank; a great lawyer who wanted to use his inside knowledge of politics to plunder the clients of banks; a financier who was lending money to legislators, who were passing bills to multiply the value of his public utility holdings.

Cornelia understood all these references; Lee Swenson was attacking the Thornwell family, undermining its claims to moral superiority. He was pointing to scandals in which her family was involved--some that were in the public prints, others that were whispered in the gossip of the clubs. And she knew it was all true; she knew that Rupert Alvin and Henry Cabot Winters and John Quincy Thornwell were busy right now framing up their perjury in the Jerry Walker case. When an I.W.W. lawyer hinted this possibility, she did not rebuke him. She did not even protect her family dignity when he mentioned that her son-in-law had begun his legal career as counsel for the Boston streets railways, which meant that he had done most kinds of dirty work known to the legal profession.

“Believe me, Nonna, I can tell you,” said the man from the wild west. “I began with the Great Northern Railroad, and spent my time gyping poor workers out of damages. I was paid five hundred a month, very nice for a young fellow, and I had the way clear before me, right up to the top, maybe a seat on the supreme court bench--that is how you get there. But it made me sick; I couldn’t forget the faces of the men I had robbed, and their pitiful wives and children. I just couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. So I threw up the job, and went in to try to help the workers; and what I saw--well, I have a simple formula, Nonna, I don’t care what a man has done in the labor cause, he can never be so guilty as those who take dividends of his sweat and blood.”

Said Cornelia: “Henry has talked to me a lot about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, trying to drag me out of it. The next time he broaches it, I’ll ask him about some of these matters.”

At which the lawyer smiled. “Well, get it straight. Don’t ask if he pays bribes to witnesses; don’t ask if he ‘frames’ them. Everything is done very carefully and decorously, in the office of a great Boston lawyer. When a witness comes in he doesn’t see the chief, he sees a young subordinate. The witness says, ‘I saw the man and he was wearing a blue hat.’ The young lawyer interrupts him, ‘Oh, surely you are mistaken, we have information that the man was wearing a red hat. Think it over and see if you weren’t mistaken.’ He sends the witness away, and next day the witness comes back, and meets another subordinate, and says, ‘I saw this man and he was wearing a red hat.’ ‘That is right,’ says the young lawyer. ‘And he was walking,’ says the witness, ‘rather slowly.’ ‘Oh, surely you are mistaken,’ says the lawyer, ‘we understand he was running at top speed. Think it over and see if you don’t realize that that is how it was.’ So the witness goes away, and next time he comes he meets a third subordinate, and he says, ‘I saw this man, and he had a red hat on, and he was running very, very fast’--and so on, until he knows exactly what happened. So then he meets the chief, and tells the chief what he saw, and the chief says, ‘That is a very good witness, a dependable person.’ When he presents the witness to the jury, he assures the jury this is a dependable person, and no one can possibly say the great and famous lawyer ever did a dishonorable action.”

IX

“Lee, I just _couldn’t_ do it!”--those were Cornelia’s parting words. He answered, “Think about it,”--knowing well that she would think about nothing else. Cowardice, weakness, false pride--she was willing to call it any bad name, but there was something in her that stopped dead when she tried to think of going upon the witness stand and swearing to a made-up story. How could truth ever exist in the world, if somebody did not stand by it?

Vanzetti came, as usual, to keep the midnight watch with her. “I am poor wop,” said he. “But what you say if it was a Thornwell?” Cornelia’s fancy played with that theme. She saw her daughter Alice, in one of those ferocious quarrels which had marked the early stages of her marital disharmony; with jealousy gnawing her heart, Alice bought a revolver and shot Henry, and so was on trial, in danger of the electric chair. But no, it was absurd, the electric chair was not for Thornwells, there could be no such issue; they would adjudge Alice insane, and put her in a sanitarium, take a year or two to “cure” her, and then let her loose. But suppose, for the sake of argument, Alice was in danger, and Cornelia had to take the witness stand. If she told the truth her daughter would be executed, and if she lied her daughter would go free. Which would she do?

Right was right, and wrong was wrong, people said, and it sounded simple. But when you met a concrete case, you discovered that you could not live by formulas. To refuse to do a lesser wrong, and thereby do a greater--was that moral? On the other hand, if you said that the end justified the means, where would you stop? Every man would be a law to himself, and there would be chaos instead of order. There must be rules, something men could count on. But the moment you said that, you had a system, with high judges sitting on top, sentencing men to death for the convenience of the Boston aristocracy. Cornelia remembered Mr. Emerson, who had said that a good citizen must not obey the laws too well.

The cruelty of the dilemma lay here, that what was supposed to be justice was really class-greed. Bart and Nick were not going to be tried because they had held up a payroll; they were going to be tried because they were dangerous leaders of social revolt. That would be the real motive power behind prosecutor, judge and jury; that would be the thought in the minds of every one of them, at every stage of the trial. The rest would be pretense, a cloak of propriety. And that was the real lie--the real perjury: Fred Katzmann’s genial smile, veiling a sneer; Web Thayer’s cold dignity, with a wink now and then to the jury. When Cornelia remembered what she had seen in the Plymouth court-room, it seemed to her that God would surely forgive any lies that served to thwart such knavery!

So she swung back and forth, from one point of view to the other, never satisfied with either. Lee Swenson said no more, but from that day his presence was a question. Bart’s picture on the mantel-piece was a challenge--what was friendship worth, it seemed to demand. You were not asked to give your life for your friend, but only your ethical code; your exclusiveness, your idea that you were something special, apart from the harsh, rough world--in short that you were “Boston”!

From first to last Betty never spoke about the matter; and that was surprising to Cornelia--it had the effect of putting her off by herself, as if in a museum, or a mausoleum. Betty and Joe were bound to have talked about the matter; everybody on the committee must have thought of it. “Mrs. Thornwell could save our boys, if she would!” To that Betty would make reply, “No use to put anything like that up to Grannie, she belongs to the old generation.” Cornelia wondered, would the new generation take the liberty of lying when it pleased? The issue did not arise, because Betty and Joe had been in Europe, and could hardly invent a special trip back, in order to be with Bart on the day of the South Braintree crime!

X

If Cornelia could not face the thought of perjury, neither could she face the other alternative. When she thought of the electric chair, and Bart and Nick strapped into it--no, no, it was too horrible, it simply _could_ not happen! So each skirmish in this war of conscience served to start Cornelia into new activity. In spite of aching back she would write more letters, in spite of tired limbs she would set forth to a committee meeting, or to speak to a group of women, to assault the ears of the heedless and drag them away from a bridge party to a murder trial.

She had the idea now that she could help the cause by persuading a group of ladies of good family to go to Dedham and watch the proceedings. They would move to the town for a month, and invade the court-room in a phalanx, and sit like the “tricoteuses” of the French revolution, doing fancy work! They might frighten “Web” Thayer into a semblance of impartiality, and possibly even restrain Fred Katzmann’s crude wit at the expense of wops. The courts were supposed to be immune to outside influences, but Cornelia knew her Boston too well for that.

In one way or another, several ladies of social standing had become interested in the case. There was Mrs. Lois Rantoul, who was a Lowell, than which nothing could be more impressive in a court-room. And Mrs. Jessica Henderson, well-to-do--though she had hurt her social position by getting arrested, along with Cornelia and Betty, the day President Wilson had been welcomed to Boston. Mrs. Henderson and her daughter Wilma had spent the night in that old Joy Street police station, and had fed their blood to the vermin--a modern form of initiation into a sisterhood of social justice.

And then Mrs. Evans, still earlier on the ground. Elizabeth Glendower Evans was the widow of a young lawyer who had died before he had ever had a case. She had become a charity worker, through youth and middle age. Now she was gray-haired--and what a relief to Cornelia to have some one else who was elderly and respectable, to help bear the brunt of criticism! Mrs. Evans had got her social awakening during the Lawrence strike of two years ago; she had gone, with others, to see fair play, and instead had seen an unresisting striker felled to earth by three husky policemen, and shoved into a patrol wagon like a dead log. Next morning she saw the man, with head cut and plastered, arraigned for assault, and she arose and told the court what she had seen. Said His Honor: “Your testimony would be important if the police were under accusation”--and thereupon he sentenced all the strikers. Mrs. Evans spoke again, saying, “I go bail for all these prisoners,”--which was very picturesque, and made a front-page story in the papers.

“Old Boston” again, you see! She was a stockholder in the Lawrence mills, which made it still more picturesque, and shocking to the mill masters. To go to strike headquarters, and say to I.W.W. leaders, wops and dagoes and guinneys and such riffraff, “I don’t know whether the wages you ask are reasonable, but I do know that you are persecuted by the authorities, and denied the legal rights to which you are entitled, and to that extent I am with you”--to say that was to become, in the columns of the press, leader of the revolution and commander-in-chief of the picket line.

Now Mrs. Evans was interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and was going to the trial at Dedham, to watch Web Thayer and Fred Katzmann, and be horrified like everybody else. And maybe her testimony would have been important, if Thayer and Katzmann had been on trial. But that time had not come, and would not come for five or six years.

XI

Captain John Quincy Thornwell, Jr., Cornelia’s grandnephew, oldest son of the president of the Fifth National Bank of Boston, had been an officer in Battery A, the fashionable militia organization, in which the young blue-bloods dashed about expensively. Tall, golden-haired, haughty, he had looked so “fetching” in his fancy uniform that he had fetched a wife who would some day own ten per cent of the electric light industry of New England. “Captain John” was a director in his father’s bank, a builder of airplanes, and of anything else which had to do with killing--so sure of his own superiority he was.

Never would Cornelia forget the day when he and his unit had departed for France. She had gone with the heartbroken young wife to see them off; a dreadful experience--all the Boston blue-bloods there in their expensive limousines, many of them stuck in a swampy field alongside the Ipswich River, caught by a sudden deluge of rain, and an ear-splitting thunderstorm; all social influence, all family connections set at nought by the irreverent elements--it was quite like being at war--blue-bloods actually struck by lightning and killed! And these refined and delicately nurtured young Harvard men, dressed in water-soaked khaki plastered with mud, standing at attention for the “Star-Spangled Banner”; then struggling with exasperated horses, to get very real and bloodthirsty cannon dragged out of mudholes!

“Captain John” had ridden off, like many others, forever; in the desperate fighting in the Argonne Forest he had disappeared from human ken. But in the process of digging up the remains of American soldiers in France there was found a seal ring with one of the bodies, and this ring was sent to Boston, and mentioned in the papers, and “Captain John’s” mother went to inspect and identify it. So now the family had a corpse in an air-tight coffin, over which to be publicly sentimental for the glory of their country. A famous sculptor was designing a monument, and meantime there were to be parades and muffled drums and prayers and salutes--and one of the street intersections most frequented by the wealth and fashion of Boston was to be christened “John Quincy Thornwell Junior Square.” All over the city and in the suburban towns they were doing this; so that future generations of tourists would walk down Jones Street, looking for the corner of Jones and Smith, and would be perplexed to discover that there was no such place, but that a quite ordinary crossing with a drugstore, an undertaking parlor, a grocery and a delicatessen shop, was known as “Michael Callahan O’Grady Square.”

These ceremonies were to take place on May 29th, two days before the opening of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial at Dedham; and the event was the subject of a vehement discussion between the great-aunt of the hero, and his cousin, Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin. Unthinkable that any relative should fail to attend this ceremony! Cornelia was going, because she was always hoping to keep peace with the family; but Betty declared that she preferred to attend a circus, in a last effort to trace the man with the bullet hole in his overcoat! When Cornelia argued that “John did give his life for his country,” the new generation answered, “Don’t talk like a legionnaire! He gave his life for Father’s bonds. I didn’t want them and I’m not going to get them, so I can’t see that I owe any reverence to my military cousin.”

“He is dead, Betty--”

“Exactly, and we aren’t helping him by parading behind his corpse. We are doing it for our own glory, and especially for the young fellows--so that when Father wants them to protect his bonds again, they’ll think they are being glorious. It is vicious propaganda for militarism, and if you who call yourself a pacifist do anything to help it along--it will simply mean that you’re old and tired, Grannie dear!”

XII

Was it accident, or was it the playful malice of fate, that Memorial Day fell on a Monday, so that the patriots had two whole days, preceding the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, to rouse the population against the Reds? On that Sunday and Monday it was estimated that at least two hundred thousand Bostonians, one-fifth of the whole population, took part in ceremonies. The governor and the mayor were busy all day long, making speeches at breakfasts, luncheons and banquets, with parades in between, and dedications and unveilings. Senators and congressmen, councilmen and district attorneys took a double holiday from stealing, and delivered eloquent praise of the flag, and denunciations of its foes, the vicious and malicious “radicals.” There was high mass in hundreds of Catholic churches, with parades of the Knights of Columbus, and speeches by the biggest and most successful rascals in Massachusetts. There were memorial services in Forest Hills Cemetery, with nine hundred veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic decorating graves. There were religious services in Fenway Park, with veterans of three wars forming in Copley Square, and loud-speakers installed so that huge throngs might hear. The Park Street Church unveiled a tablet, with names of the members who had given their lives in the World War. The Elks paraded, and had a bugler sounding taps. The oldest veterans, too feeble even to put wreaths on graves, were taken in launches, to strew flowers on the bay in honor of the unknown dead.

All over the Commonwealth the same thing went on; no community too small to have its heroes and its memories. Flag poles were set up and monuments unveiled. Quincy, the largest city in Norfolk County, from which the Sacco-Vanzetti jury was to be drawn, dedicated three squares to its dead. One man had been killed in the Spanish War, another in an uprising in the Philippines; many years they had spent in the land of the shades without distinction, but now they were called up--on the day before two anarchist bandits went to trial! The first Quincy boy killed in the Civil War was resurrected for honors--sixty years he had been forgotten! In Bridgewater, scene of the crime for which Vanzetti was in prison, the remains of a World War veteran brought back from France were buried with solemn ceremonials; in Braintree, scene of the second crime, another body was buried, with the whole population in attendance--a parade, and speeches by officials, with the selectmen and other great persons standing by with bared heads. Another in Quincy, another in Weymouth--with banners furled, and muffled drums, and soldiers firing a salute over the grave.

A storm of patriotic fervor, a torrent of eloquence, in support of America, and in denunciation of her foes; hundreds of thousands of patient people, standing reverently in the spring sunshine; millions of the same kind reading about it in editions of a dozen great newspapers; and only one circumstance to mar the perfection of the double holiday--the fact that the papers were obliged to print details of several scandals then in the midst of exploding with a frightful stink. The attorney general of the Commonwealth had just filed charges against the district attorney of Middlesex County, just across the river from Boston, charging him with having blackmailed a group of leading moving picture producers of something over a hundred thousand dollars, the price of immunity for a “Nero’s Circus” which they had held in a roadhouse. The papers were full of lurid details about naked girls dancing the highland fling; they said that several leading politicians and criminal lawyers of Boston had shared in the loot.

Also the state bank commissioner was digging into the matter of the bribery of legislators revealed by the recent bank failures; and it was an embarrassing fact that many patriotic orators of this double holiday had been sharing in such graft. The public did not know it, but the orators knew it, so they pounded the rostrum, and waved their arms until their faces grew purple and the sweat dissolved the starch in their collars; the loud-speakers bellowed, and the parks and public places, the churches and temples and banquet halls resounded with sentiments of seraphic idealism, voiced by persons whose social functions were those of hogs in a trough.

XIII

It was not so bad at the ceremony which Cornelia attended; because that was Thornwell, and you may be sure the clan saw to it that no person tainted with scandal did any orating at John Quincy Thornwell Junior Square. The clan knew--for were they not the paymasters? The mayor of the city happened to be a blue-blood that year--a rare interval of respectability. And if the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth was to go directly from the governor’s chair to the vice-presidency of one of Rupert’s banks, and soon after having appointed two of Rupert’s very good friends to the supreme judicial bench--well, that was a scandal of such colossal proportions that it became respectable. Men could not face the implications of it, so it was not discussed, except by a few insiders, and members of the rival banking group, who knew what Rupert was after.

A grand stand had been built, and flags and bunting made the consecrated square into a child’s dream of peppermint candy. Lines of ropes and policemen kept the throngs back; and there came “Captain John’s” own Battery A, khaki-clad, with rumble of guns and tramp of horses, and fluttering of pennants, red field, with figures in yellow. And the infantry, known as the “Cadets,” in long blue trousers with yellow stripes. There came a hundred Grand Army veterans, pitiful old boys in every stage of decrepitude, carrying their tattered battle flags, and wearing their faded blue uniforms, covered with medals and decorations. There came khaki-clad veterans of American Legion posts, and the Boy Cadets, their faces newly washed and shining. There came automobiles full of great personages in braided broadcloth suits and shiny top hats, and ladies in costly chiffons and new spring bonnets.

A beautiful show; with rolling of drums and blowing of bugles, and standing up and sitting down again, and baring heads and bowing them, while the rector of Trinity Church in the City of Boston offered an invocation to the God of Battles, and His Son, the Prince of Peace. War and Peace were thus mixed up in the ceremony, so that nobody could tell at any moment which was which. The orators declared that the way to insure peace was to prepare for war; upon which program the nations had just led themselves into the greatest war to end war in all history, and now were spending several times as much money to prepare for an even greater war to end war.

It would be safe to say that in that vast throng of cheering and singing and reverently listening people, these traitor-thoughts found lodgment in only one head, that of the little old lady who sat in the front row, among the highest of the high-up dignitaries. She, the widow of a former governor, a Thornwell, and the great-aunt of the hero, could not have been denied her proper place without making a scandal, and emphasizing the dreadful rumors that she had been seduced by the enemy within our gates, and turned into a friend of bomb throwers and bandits. So nice to look upon, with her hair now almost white, and her little round face much wrinkled, but still jolly, and her new spring costume selected and presented by her daughter Alice of impeccable taste; so gentle in manner, so quiet and ladylike--it was impossible to believe what everybody knew about her, that she was actually going down to Dedham the next day, and face all the uproar and notoriety, and lend her sanction to the defense of desperate anarchists on trial for their lives.

She watched with tears in her eyes, while her great-grandniece, the little daughter of the dead hero, came forward to draw the veil from the bronze tablet. The bugles blew, and the audience rose and bared its head, and the bands started to play “America,” and everybody sang--a sublime moment. The lovely young widow of the hero had to hide her face in her hands, and even the stolid James Scatterbridge and the cynical Henry Cabot Winters and the stately Rupert Alvin were not ashamed to be moved. Cornelia’s tears were right and proper, and she kept her traitor-thoughts to herself. No one guessed that she was weeping for other heroes who were still to die. For the little boys in their khaki uniforms, lifting their shining faces to the orators and the beautiful waving flags! For the mothers who brought them there, to be consecrated and pledged to future slaughters! For the great humble masses who packed the streets in every direction, and stood bareheaded and trusting, gazing up to the great ones, and believing every word the loud-speakers told them!

A sharp division in that audience, between the many who believed, and the few who knew. To the former the name America, and its symbol, the flag, meant liberty and justice for all mankind; while to the few it meant private property in land, machinery and credit, and the exploitation of labor based thereon. By means of this system, the knowing ones had brought the lesser nations and weaker peoples into debt to them; so America and the flag meant battleships and guns and airplanes and poison gas to collect this tribute to all eternity. That was the reason these busy gentlemen took two days off from business, and built stands and tacked up decorations, and set up loud-speakers to carry the words of politicians and priests and preachers to crowds in the public squares. That was why you heard no patriotic address which failed to mention the “enemy within our gates,” the vicious and criminal “Reds” who refused to love America and appreciate her ideals, but wanted to overthrow the greatest government in the world, and repudiate all the debts, and nationalize all the women, and make America a vassal of what the orators called the “Bolshevikis,” or sometimes, like Judge Webster Thayer, the “arnychists.”

BOSTON

_A Novel by_ UPTON SINCLAIR

VOLUME II

UPTON SINCLAIR STATION A PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

COPYRIGHT · 1928 · BY UPTON SINCLAIR

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First and Second Printings before publication