Chapter XV: The Whispering Gallery (2)

An extraordinary moment for the Community Church: the president of the Pilgrim National Bank and his wife in attendance, dressed exactly as if for a real wedding, and holding themselves sternly erect, unaware of the existence of newspaper photographers. Also the older sister of the bride, Mrs. Priscilla Alvin Shaw, descending carefully from her motor car, clad in the voluminous garment known as a “maternity gown.” Also Aunt Clara Scatterbridge--without even having been invited, but determined to do her part to maintain family solidarity, and hush the voice of scandal. This wedding, while unorthodox and unesthetic, was legal; so the horrible black shadow would be lifted from the Thornwells! No more poison-pen letters, no more whispers in Back Bay drawing-rooms! The escutcheon would be wiped clean--and the family was so relieved, it would accept any kind of performance, in any kind of made-over garage.

The bridegroom being a newspaper man, his colleagues would be loyal to him; those who happened to know that he had had a former wife, would not mention it. They would “play up” the note of social drama--the press agent of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense marrying into the sacred Brahmin caste! The young couple were going to spend their honeymoon in a factory, getting first-hand information as to the lives of the workers; the daughter of the most powerful banker in Boston had actually got a job in a paper-box factory, at a little less than two dollars a day, and promised to live on it for a year!

When the reporters actually got upon the scene, and witnessed the big shiny limousine of the Alvins, with a chauffeur in uniform, and an equipage equally costly for the bride’s sister, and yet another for an aunt--only then did they realize the explosive power of the story. This wasn’t merely a local story, this was an “A.P. story”! The reporter for the Hearst paper had an inspiration: it was a “sociological marriage”! A Hearst reporter would not hesitate to tackle Jehovah himself, if he could get into heaven; so he walked up to the great banker and asked him for a comment upon his daughter’s honeymoon. The haughty Rupert looked straight over the young ruffian’s head--he was tall enough to do that. But alas, the mother of the bride, being less trained in the wiles of “Hearst men,” committed the mistake of opening her mouth. “Mr. Alvin makes it a rule not to be quoted in newspapers.” The reporter, seizing his golden opportunity, explained, “I just wanted to know, Mrs. Alvin, if your husband agrees with his daughter’s ideas on social questions.” The great lady replied, haughtily, “My husband does not agree with _any_ of his daughter’s ideas!” So, of course, the whole town had a hilarious laugh next morning.

In fact, the story “took” so well that the word went forth to follow it up. The reporters tracked the bride to the paper-box factory, and took pictures of her at work. They tracked her to the little apartment where the “sociological honeymoon” was to be passed, and published her in a fifty-cent apron, frying her first supper of bacon and eggs; they gave the price of all the ingredients, and a schedule of the “sociological budget.” They interviewed the ardent young lady propagandist on every subject with which her father could fail to agree: trial marriages, love and freedom, birth control, social justice, the banking system, capital and labor, the Lucy Stone League. Nor did they fail to call up the palace on the North Shore, and ask if Mrs. Alvin would come to the phone, and hear a summary of her daughter’s opinions, and say whether her husband would agree with them!

XIII

One of the McAnarney brothers, attorneys for the defense, got into conversation with old Mr. Ripley, the flag-saluting foreman of the jury, and was told, quite casually, how this foreman had had revolver cartridges, similar to the ones which had been found upon Sacco, and how Ripley had marked them, and taken them into the jury room and shown them to some of the jurors, comparing them with the exhibits of the prosecution. A thrill of excitement ran through the Sacco-Vanzetti defense; here, as in the Plymouth trial, was evidence improperly introduced, never seen by the defense. As fate willed it, Ripley died before his testimony could be taken. But the jurors were interviewed, and several swore that they had seen the cartridges; also Ripley’s widow had seen them.

It was the first of a series of motions for a new trial, which were to entertain the friends of the defense for a period of six years. The “Ripley motion,” and then the “Daley motion”--Daley being the friend of Ripley’s, who told of the conversation at the railroad station, when Ripley said that he was on the way to report for jury duty in the case of a couple of “guinneys” accused of banditry, and, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyhow.”

And then a letter from Frank Burke, the exhibitor of glass-blowing, telling how he had run into Roy Gould, the salesman of shaving-paste. The mystery of the man with the bullet-hole through his overcoat solved at last! Gould had been up in Nova Scotia all this time; now he was in Portland, Maine; and Fred Moore jumped onto a train, and the friends of the defense got the greatest thrill yet. For it was just as they had been told--Gould had been within five or ten feet of the bandit who was supposed to be Sacco, and this bandit had fired at him and pierced his overcoat. Gould came to Dedham jail and looked at Sacco, and said that he had never seen him before, and that he bore no resemblance to the bandit.

So the Boston papers broke into headlines, “New Evidence in Sacco Case,” and hope sprang to life in every heart. Surely there would be a new trial now! Surely it would not be possible to execute a man, when it was known that evidence of such importance had been deliberately withheld from the jury! For that was what had happened--the salesman of shaving-paste had given his name to a police officer, and this officer made affidavit that he had turned it in to both the local and the state police. Captain Proctor had had it!

To ardent young radicals that seemed a scandal of major proportions, and they proceeded to send out press items and to print leaflets and mail circulars--only to discover that nobody was interested except ardent young radicals. The great Commonwealth was content to leave the matter to what it called “the orderly processes of law”--which meant precisely this and nothing else: that affidavits would be typed out and sworn to, and submitted in a motion to Judge Thayer, who would take a year to study over them, and would then produce one of his famous decisions, in which the defense position would be misrepresented, and arguments of the defense would be met by answers to other arguments which the defense had never thought of!

In this case the old judge’s decision was such as to cause people to wonder whether his hatred had not driven him insane. He gave his reason for denying the motion in the following words: “The affiant (Gould) never saw Sacco, according to his affidavit, from April 15th, 1920, the day of the murder, until November 10, 1921, when he went to Dedham jail at the request of Mr. Moore. In other words, the affiant must have carried a correct mental photograph in his mind of Sacco for practically eighteen months, when he only had a glance in which to take this photograph on the day of the murder.” “Web” Thayer actually wrote those words, and read them from the bench, and caused them to be printed in the law-books--along with the affidavit of Gould, which stated in the plainest possible words, not merely that Gould had not seen Sacco on April 15th, 1920, but that Gould had never seen Sacco in his life until the occasion when he saw him in Dedham jail, eighteen months after the crime, and three months after the conviction!

XIV

And then the “Pelzer motion.” Louis Pelzer was the bewildered Jewish shoe-worker, who had made such a spectacle of himself on the witness-stand, claiming to identify Sacco upon seeing him many months after the crime, and at the same time admitting under cross-examination that he had lied to an investigator for the defense. Now Pelzer made an affidavit to the effect that his identification of Sacco was false, and that the words, “his dead image,” had been put into his mouth by the assistant district attorney, Mr. Harold Williams, whom the august Commonwealth was soon to make into a superior court judge.

And then the “Goodridge motion.” Here was the star witness of the prosecution, whose criminal record had been kept from the jury by the perfect team-work of those expert basketball players, Messrs. Katzmann and Thayer. Now the defense got onto the trail of the several-times-convicted crook, and obtained all his record, the jail sentences, the numerous wives, and the warrant for horse-stealing in New York State, which would have meant a long sentence, as a third conviction. Fred Moore and another man ran their quarry down in the little town of Vassalboro, Maine, and saw his wrists held out for the handcuffs. Moore was naïve enough to be surprised that the authorities did not want this crook any more--neither in Maine, nor in New York, nor in Massachusetts could the machinery of exact and impartial justice be prodded into action. Moore, being an Irishman, and emotional, was emphatic with his victim, and brought down upon his head a stern rebuke from the just and upright Mr. Justice Thayer for his method of procedure. Which was all that came of the “Goodridge motion”!

And then the “Andrews motion.” The son of “Fainting Lola” was discovered, also living among the “Mainiacs.” He consented to come to meet his mother, who was working as a waitress. He reminded her of various emotional dramas in which she had played a rôle; with the result that Lola had more hysterics, and broke down and admitted that her testimony against Sacco had been “framed.” In the presence of two well-known labor leaders she signed an affidavit, declaring that her reason for swearing Sacco’s life away was that “the Commonwealth was in possession of facts relative to the private life of the affiant which the affiant was not desirous of having brought out on the witness stand,” and that by threats based on that knowledge she was “coerced and intimidated.” She named the four men who had done this; one was Mike Stewart, inventor of the “theory,” another was Brouillard, a police officer, the third was Mr. Harold Williams, soon to be a judge, and the fourth was District Attorney Frederick G. Katzmann.

Another thrill ran through the little band of defenders. For Lola Andrews had been the other star witness of the prosecution--it was she of whom Katzmann had said with such intense solemnity to the jury, “I cannot recall that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews.” Even the capitalist newspapers were moved to protest now; the Boston _American_ declared that either Lola was crazy, “or else some one in the district attorney’s office at that time ought to be arrested and tried for attempted murder.” Upon reading that, the police authorities of the august Commonwealth got busy--not to arrest themselves for attempted murder, but to compel Lola and Louis to sign new affidavits, declaring that their previous affidavits were false, and had been obtained by threats from the defense lawyers.

XV

The Great Novelist who makes up history was desirous of making a perfect melodrama, and also a perfect demonstration of class justice, out of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. To that end it was necessary to provide an answer to the question: what would happen in the pious Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts if a rich man were to commit a murder? While Sacco and Vanzetti were in jail, awaiting trial, a poor devil of a Swede by the name of Johnson, having a wife and two young children, but no job, and no food in the house, and no coal in the month of January, went into some woods on a private estate, with a saw and wheelbarrow, for the purpose of gathering dead wood, which was lying in profusion on the ground. The aged owner of this estate was a Cunningham, a name of great honor in the fashionable town of Milton; and in the pride of his name and great possessions he took a rifle and shot the unarmed Swede. He fired without aiming; the victim had just got over a fence, escaping. The killer was arrested and brought to Dedham jail, and spent eight days in a cell near Sacco, and then was politely bailed out.

Cornelia, in her thinking about Massachusetts justice, had imagined a rich person committing murder, and had guessed that such a person would be declared insane. But the case of Commonwealth _vs._ Cunningham showed her that she had expected too much from the law. The blue-blood families keep their insane members hidden away in remote wings of old mansions, and do not permit the stigma to be put upon them in public proceedings. For thirteen months the killer of John Johnson did not even have to make a plea. At last he was brought to trial in Dedham Court House, where Sacco and Vanzetti had faced the jury. Public feeling had cooled off; and no evidence was produced to prove that he was either an anarchist, an infidel, or a draft dodger. So the stern Mr. Katzmann became gracious and mild; the crime was called “justifiable homicide,” and the killer was acquitted.

Also it was necessary to the perfection of the Sacco-Vanzetti melodrama that the victims should have continual evidence of the venality of their persecutors. The Great Novelist arranged it that three more times during the next six years emissaries should come to the defense, pointing out the folly of spending so much money upon lawyers’ fees and circulars, when the small sum of fifty thousand dollars, slipped to the right lawyers, would set their two friends “on the street.” And lest the young radicals should be unable to believe that these emissaries really possessed the power they claimed, the Great Novelist caused what was known as the “Coakley-Pelletier scandal” to break into continuous explosion, after the fashion of Chinese firecrackers strung on a line all the way along a city street. For months the newspapers were filled with picturesque details about the crimes and sexual misadventures of Boston millionaires, and the prices they had paid to politicians and officials.

Dan Coakley was a Democratic lawyer, who had run the city of Cambridge for some twenty years: a lively personality who had begun life as a street-car conductor and had given up his job when the company installed machines to register fares. He had his license as a conductor, signed by the superintendent of the company, with the words scrawled across it: “Discharged for neglect of duty.” It had amused Dan to frame this document, and hang it in his law office, while he was preparing damage suits which cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Needless to say, he was an ardent patriot; he had paid the expenses of the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic convention in San Francisco, so that they might vote for the Quaker attorney-general, who was so heroically smashing the Reds. For years, if you wanted to get out of trouble in either Middlesex or Suffolk County, the password was, “See Coakley.”

The district attorney of Suffolk County, which includes the city of Boston, was “Joe” Pelletier. (All Massachusetts statesmen go by their pet names, unless they have a great deal of money.) “Joe” likewise was an ardent patriot, and never lost a chance to deliver an oration for God, country, and the pope. He was National Advocate for the Knights of Columbus, which is the political auxiliary of the Catholic Church; he had been knighted by the pope; and it was his job to drop charges against wealthy criminals, after they had paid proper retaining fees to the proper lawyers.

This had been going on for so many years, under the protection of the flag and the crucifix, that the ring had got bold, and had taken to “framing” cases against victims. That was all right when it was a couple of anarchist “wops,” but it was a different matter when it meant sending women to lure rich blue-bloods into bed, and have detectives smash in the doors and take photographs of them. The “ring” had a regularly paid staff of women, and three apartments in the Back Bay. In one case they had gone so far as to have the woman hidden in a closet, unknown to the victim, and in this way they had got an enormous sum from a terrified old railroad president--an Adams, and a “right” one! In another case they had collected forty thousand dollars from a man on his deathbed.

XVI

It was after the trapping of Josiah Thornwell Winters that the blue-bloods decided to smash this “ring.” Councils were held in the Union Club, and a citizen who had no scandals was found--the head of the Watch and Ward Society--and persuaded to the dangerous job. Godfrey L. Cabot was his name, and before he got through, it was a well-known name to the readers of Boston newspapers. For of course the ring knew what he was doing before he knew it himself, and was setting traps for him after a fashion too fantastic for anything but reality. Mr. Cabot got a dictaphone in Coakley’s office, and hired a spy to hire himself to Coakley and arrange to bribe Pelletier. But presently the spy was arrested, and Godfrey L. Cabot was indicted for hiring a man to offer bribes. The climax of hilarity came when it was revealed that it was Dan who had hired the spy, to get himself hired by Godfrey to come and hire Dan to bribe Joe!

Impossible to imagine more melodrama than this scandal provided for the readers of Boston newspapers through the better part of a year! Underworld ladies trapped into telling their stories, with stenographers hidden behind screens; elderly blue-bloods “railroaded” into lunatic asylums for their money; hotel proprietors forced to part with their property for a small part of its value; the “badger game” and the “shakedown,” the “girl with the dimpled nose,” a “visiting actress,” “the Egyptian mystic, Omar Kaldah”! Hardly a day without a new millionaire in the pillory, or a “scion of wealth” relieved of his patrimony! A series of sensational trials, with witnesses “grilled” and “broken” by great lawyers who “thundered” and “stormed.” United States Senator “Jim” Reed, endowed with the voice of a bull, defending his Democratic colleague, “Joe”:

“Does this diabolical persecution spring from religious prejudice? Is that the thing which inspires Cabot and his crew; that makes them gather witnesses from the four quarters of the earth; that gives protection to the criminal and the near-criminal? I do not know, but this I boldly say, that I have never seen such digging in the catacombs of the past, such raking of the dust of time, such malicious ingenuity, such fixed determination as we have witnessed.”

And then the attorney-general, answering the bull-voiced senator, and describing the “national advocate” of the Knights of Columbus in metaphors taken from classical oratory:

“The sword of justice was placed in his hands and he made of it a highwayman’s club. He used the scales of justice to weigh the price of corrupt favors. He has bartered the powers of his great office to the highest bidder. For personal ends he has protected the criminal and oppressed the innocent. He has so far forgotten his honor and his oath that he has brought reproach upon the fair name of the Commonwealth, has allowed her mantle to be dragged in the mire, has debauched his high office for his own selfish ends, and like Esau of old, has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.” No wonder the life of the attorney-general was threatened, and guards had to protect his home!

Also Dan Coakley was indicted and tried. The blue-bloods employed no less than thirty-six detectives to guard the jury; when Dan was acquitted, the blue-bloods wished they had hired more of them. However, Dan was disbarred from practice; and “Joe” Pelletier, National Advocate for the Knights of Columbus and hero of all Catholic patriots, was removed from office and disbarred. But not until he had gone up and down the county telling what he knew about his enemies. He announced himself as candidate for mayor--Democratic Catholic “Joe,” friend of the common man, persecuted by holier-than-thou exploiters and wholesale bribe-givers. The common man thought that sounded very good; to him the victims of the blackmail ring were millionaire degenerates, preying upon his daughters; and since the law could not get them, let Joe take their money, and give part of it to the church, to be expended for orphan asylums and altar cloths!

But what a shudder in blue-blood circles, when this man who knew all secrets got up on the stump and started reciting names, places and dates. Stopping not at the most exalted offices! When he discussed the Supreme Judicial Court, he said things of interest to the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were making such expensive appeals to the supreme judicial virtue of that great tribunal:

“Go up some day and watch the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court file down to the Union Club. Whom do they eat with? The capital interests, the corporation lawyers for the street railway cases, the gas cases, the light cases. These are the men that break bread with them. That may not mean anything to you. If so, bless you for your innocence! I confess to being more suspicious by nature.”

Thus people’s friend “Joe,” soon to be tried by that same tribunal!