Chapter XX: The Decision (2)

Learn how the world is governed, Cornelia--now in your seventy-third year of life! Once upon a time people did things like this to you, and you were too gentle and trusting, too much of a “lady” to know it, or to believe it when it was pointed out to you. But now do it yourself! Seek out the weak spot in the armor of a motor-car salesman who has forty million dollars, but no “social position,” and has a Catholic wife, a cruel handicap in Massachusetts! Get busy at the telephone, and put it up to your daughters, as hard as you know how--if they have one particle of love for you in their hearts, if ever they had a particle of love in their hearts, to spare you this dreadful anguish!

True it is that the motor-car salesman has made public attacks on Rupert Alvin, calling him an arch-corruptionist and things like that; but that is just politics, and social life is another thing altogether. The motor-car salesman will doubtless know what is being done to him; he is a business man, and does not give something for nothing, nor expect to get something for nothing. To be received in one of the greatest homes in New England, to put his feet under the table with haughty and unapproachable Brahmins--that counts for nothing to him personally, or so he pretends, being “bull-headed” and defiant; but he has a wife, and children growing up to the age of marriage, and what the women and children clamor for cannot be overlooked by the most self-satisfied of self-made millionaires.

Cornelia had her way. Ladies do in Boston, when they are persistent, and when they are old. The formal invitation was written by Deborah Alvin, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and delivered by a chauffeur at the Governor’s summer home, at Rye Beach in New Hampshire. A couple of hours later an automobile arrived at the North Shore palace of the Rupert Alvins, with a formally written acceptance. Deborah got busy, and invited half a dozen members of the family, and intimate friends who could be taken into the secret. Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge came--another stage in her feminist revolt! Alice Thornwell Winters came, dressed in pale lavender, the color which harmonized with her aura; having lost a great deal of weight on a humming-bird diet, she had taken up a new rôle, and was a picture of delicate and spiritualized melancholy.

The Governor and his lady arrived, in the very latest model of Packard limousine, custom-built, preceded by a car full of alert-looking men with bulging hip-pockets, and followed by another carload. Several posted themselves at the front door, others walked round and round the house and peered into bushes and under porches. One, who looked and acted like a guest, wandered about the downstairs rooms all through the meal; the Commonwealth was taking no chances--especially in a home where the mother-in-law was one of the most notorious Reds. These precautions lent an extra thrill to the meal, but good form required that no one should know anything about them.

The supersalesman sat at the right of his hostess; on the other side was Alice, and the matter-of-fact and rosy gentleman had never encountered anything so much like heaven. She told him about his aura, which was news to him; Deborah told him about her orphan asylum, and Rupert told about his chapel, and how a bishop from England had praised the design of the apse. Never a word about the distressing news which was on the front pages of all the papers! “Cura nulla medicabilis arte” may have been all right for a poet two thousand years ago, but the social arts of “old Boston” had mastered all human weakness.

Except that at the end of a delightful evening Deborah led her distinguished guest to one side, and burdened him for a moment with the story of how her old mother was suffering so that they feared for her life; would she be presuming if she asked the Governor to reprieve the two wretched men for a couple of weeks, until the hope of court action could be tried out? The supersalesman replied with all the caution of a skilled politician. It would not do for him to say outright, because the final decision rested with his Council. But privately, and in strictest confidence, he would assure Mrs. Alvin of his best endeavors, and she might convey that information to her mother under a seal of secrecy. When the ordeal was over, and Cornelia was free to tell the story to Betty and Joe, she commented upon the way the world is governed. Said Betty: “Don’t you know, Grannie, the real cause of the world war--that King Edward of England was not sufficiently polite to his nephew, Emperor William of Germany?”

XIV

On Monday evening Judge Webster Thayer handed down a decision, to the effect that he had no jurisdiction to entertain any motion in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. By this ruling he claimed to have avoided passing upon his own prejudice; but at the same time he said, in open court, “I had no prejudice.” He said it many times.

On Tuesday morning he gave another decision, refusing the request for a revocation and stay of sentence. He gave this out from his home in Worcester, where two police officers watched by day and two by night, and one followed behind the judge when he went walking with his dog. In the toilet of a subway station in New York, a bomb had exploded, wrecking the station and seriously injuring two persons. The friends of law and order were certain that the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti had set this bomb; while the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti were equally certain that their worst enemies had done it. In the State House in Boston a package had been found in one of the elevators; after listening for clockwork inside, and hearing nothing, the police had opened it with many precautions, and found two pounds of chocolate.

Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court declared that he had no power to grant a motion for a new trial; it was a problem how to bring the matter before the Full Court. Federal Judge Anderson declined to intervene--in spite of “Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86.” In fact he thought that decision worked the other way. A difficult matter to make a science out of the law, when no one could determine what it meant, and there were no angels to administer it! Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court said that he had no authority, but pointed out that they were at liberty to try some judge of the circuit court; however, the judges of the circuit court advised trying the supreme court. It was as Bart had noted long ago--everybody put the problem off on somebody else!

Hill and Field and Musmanno went racing about from one court to another, and from one summer resort to another--wherever a judge might be intercepted. Behind them chased Attorney General Reading, his pockets full of money from the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.”; and behind him one or more carloads of reporters, liberally provided with funds by large-scale purveyors of sensation. Hill made another appeal to the Governor for a stay; and the Governor announced that he would not grant the request. That was Tuesday afternoon, and the execution was set for Wednesday midnight.

“What does that mean, Deborah?”--it was Cornelia phoning to her daughter, tormented with anxiety.

“I don’t know, Mother. I only know what he told me. He may have his reasons. We ought not to talk about it over the telephone.” So there was nothing to do but wait, and guess at the tortuous motives of a supersalesman of automobiles, whose heart was set upon moving to the White House.

Betty and Joe were absorbed in frantic efforts to awaken public opinion. The respectable lawyers were out of favor now, and it was permitted to make “propaganda.” The committee had issued a call for a hundred thousand persons to come to Boston and voice the protest of America against judicial murder. About two hundred came. For the most part they only added to the confusion, because there was no one to organize them or put them to work. No two had the same idea of what should be done; and when they came to the committee, they found exactly the same state of disagreement.

Many of the group from New York, especially the liberals and the lawyers, thought that the crucial issue was the Department of Justice files. They started a clamor: “Open the files!” Several newspapers took it up. But this program met with strong opposition from the Italian anarchists. Could there be things in these files which Italian anarchists did not want to see upon the front pages of newspapers? The liberals got so far as to induce the Department of Justice to say that the files would be turned over to Governor Fuller or to President Lowell, if either would ask for them; but these worthies took exactly the same attitude as the anarchists, and for exactly the same reason. There were more things in the class struggle than were dreamed of in the philosophy of amiable liberals.

XV

One thing all sympathizers could do, and that was to get arrested. Over at socialist headquarters in Essex Street was a little group which had a program, and an organization to carry it out. A group of students came there, and placards and sandwich signs were made, calling upon Governor Fuller for justice. Young men and women sallied forth--and as they emerged from the building, a squad of police fell upon them, and took away the signs and tore them to pieces. So the job had to be done all over; the signs were prepared secretly, and would-be paraders came one by one to the place of demonstration, hiding their signs until they were on the picket-line.

On Tuesday afternoon some thirty paraders made their appearance in front of the State House, each wearing a placard with a Sacco-Vanzetti argument upon it. For a while the police let them alone, and contented themselves with keeping the crowd on the other side of the street. On the Beacon Street front of the State House there is an iron picket-fence, which curves in towards the main entrance, making a large half moon; so there was a comfortable space for paraders, and a chance for their sentiments to be legible. They walked in silence, keeping in motion, paying no attention to any one: a form of demonstration which had first been used on Broadway, New York, during the Colorado coal strike, and had been taken up by the Boston suffragists at the time of President Wilson’s visit, when Cornelia and Betty and Mrs. Henderson and her daughter had gone to jail. The city had passed a special ordinance to meet that form of insurrection; it provided against “sauntering and loitering,” and the suffrage women had called it “loitering for liberty.”

Too bad that so many of the demonstrators were foreigners, especially Russians and Jews, who were disliked in Boston. Such names as Berkowitch and Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck and Shklar did not produce a good effect when read aloud over morning codfish-balls and coffee. But when you call for martyrs you cannot be fastidious, and your recruits will probably come from the martyr races--especially the Jews, who discovered the idea. So Berkowitch and Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck and Shklar, male and female, walked up and down in front of the high stone building with the golden dome, their faces pale and set with determination. With them walked Alfred Baker Lewis representing the socialists, and Harry J. Canter and Bertram Wolfe representing the communists, and Grace Hutchins representing Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.

State House guards lined the picket-fence, and square-jawed, hard-faced “plainclothesmen” slipped in and out among the crowd. The statue of Daniel Webster surveyed the scene impassively; also the tall equestrian figure of General Hooker, green with verdigris, and white with the droppings of birds on top of his head. From the windows above, the State House gang looked down, and cursed, or cracked their jokes; the bootleggers and friends of bootleggers, the sellers of public privileges, the boon companions of large scale plunderers, who had millions to spend for immunity.

Over on the other side of Beacon Street was the Shaw monument, glorifying a young Harvard aristocrat who had given his life to raise Negro slaves to manhood. Here walked “cops” with clubs in their hands and guns on their hips, wondering how long it would be before they were turned loose on the “Bolshevikis”; also members of the American Legion, stirring up the crowd, crying their hatred of the “goddam Reds.” Few of the spectators needed any incitement; their heads were stuffed with the contents of newspapers, and they were sure the “Guinneys” were guilty, and should have been “burned” long ago.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the number of the paraders had grown to a hundred and twenty-five, and the police decided that it had gone far enough. Captain McDevitt appeared and read the riot act. Under the law the “saunterers and loiterers” had seven minutes in which to disperse. When they continued marching, the police surrounded thirty-nine of them, and loaded them into patrol-wagons, and carted them to the old Joy Street police station, followed by a crowd shouting, “Beat them up! Hang them!” That was just words, of course; Massachusetts is a law-abiding Commonwealth, fitting completely into the formula of Lenin which Betty Alvin was so fond of quoting: “The state is a monopoly of violence.”

XVI

The monopolists of violence were making their preparations for such a show of their commodity as no city in America had ever witnessed in time of peace. The old Charlestown prison was turned into an arsenal; a cupola-crowned, octagon-shaped building of hand-cut stone, with red-brick wings covered with ivy, its walls now had dozens of machine guns mounted on top, and stores of ammunition, and sixteen searchlights playing at night. Eight hundred policemen, carrying riot guns with bayonets, took possession of the streets approaching the prison, and roped them off, stopping all traffic over Prison Point Bridge, and on Rutherford Avenue, a main thoroughfare, for half a mile. They were posted on all the house-tops surrounding the prison. In front of the gates were a hundred mounted Boston troopers, and a hundred of the state constabulary riding the streets. Firemen were on hand with high pressure hoses to repel mobs, and there was a plentiful store of tear and gas bombs, gas masks and bullet-proof vests.

All day Wednesday the eight hundred and eighty-one inmates of the prison went their usual round, with arms folded and lips shut. They were not supposed to know what was going on; but rumor spreads in penitentiaries, as fast as anywhere else. All the prisoners knew that the death-sentence was to be carried out at midnight, unless the courts or the Governor intervened. They knew that eighteen Western Union wires had been run into the officers’ club of the prison, and that reporters were swarming there to send out the news of the execution. At nine o’clock the prison lights winked out one by one; but nobody went to sleep.

In the death-house, in three narrow cells side by side, were the condemned men; Sacco and Vanzetti and Madeiros, the Portuguese who had managed to hitch his fate onto theirs. Sacco was on the fourth week of a “hungry strike,” and Vanzetti was also fasting; they were haggard and wasted, gray and grim. No one was permitted to see them, except their lawyers and relatives. Vanzetti had a sister on her way from Italy; if he were executed according to schedule she would not see him alive. The mother and sister of Madeiros had come for a visit; also Rosina Sacco, who spent her time trying to persuade her husband to sign some papers for the lawyers. But he was more stubborn than ever before. “They have had me nailed to the cross for seven years. Why should I keep it up?” Rosina broke down and had to be carried away.

The newspapermen noted that Sacco and Vanzetti did not behave like other condemned criminals; they did not chat with their keepers, nor sit and play cards with them, shoving the cards under the barred doors of the cells. They preferred to brood, staring at a little square patch of sunlight which fell from the roof upon the floor, the only reminder of the outside world. At night, when the searchlights played upon the death-house, they saw nothing, nor did they hear the sound of horses’ hoofs. They were permitted to have their books and papers; despite the fact that Vanzetti had written a statement in which he had called Governor Fuller a “murderer.” They wrote farewell letters to the world: still cherishing the “messianic delusion,” the idea that posterity would be interested in their sufferings.

XVII

All that day the lawyers rushed about, and the Governor was busy with his advisers. His Council was in session, also the seven ex-attorney-generals of the Commonwealth, invited to advise him as to the law on the matter of a respite. On the street outside, several squads of pickets were being dragged off to jail, with more or less violence. Those who had been arrested the day before were being denied their hearings in police-court, and condemned to pay fines without argument. Some refused, and went to jail; others paid, and came out to join the “death march” again.

Marvelous copy for the newspapers, which printed everybody’s guesses as to what was going to happen; every detail about the police preparations, and diagrams of the death-house, and photographs of the electric chair, and of the executioner--a gentleman who made a specialty of sending two thousand volts of electricity into living human bodies; he came from New York, it appeared, and was paid by the piece. For this job he was to get seven hundred and fifty dollars, and shocking as the statement may sound, he was overcharging the great Commonwealth. The people of Massachusetts, having elected their best business man to attend to their affairs, surely had a right to expect the discounts customary to the trade; but here was New York State getting its killings done by the same killer for only one hundred and fifty per!

Young Musmanno went to see his clients, to get another paper signed. They were glad to have some one to remind them that human affection still survived in a world given up to business. Sacco refused to sign, as usual; Vanzetti signed, hoping it would help both of them. He was reading the Beards on “The Rise of American Civilization”--at the same time that he watched its fall. He was not going to be able to finish these large, expensive volumes, so he wanted to give them to the young lawyer as a token of regard. But Musmanno couldn’t bear to take them, because it would be admitting that Vanzetti was to die that night. They had quite an argument about it; and several times Sacco would break in with his realist humor: “Take the books, Musmanno! Take the books!”

Musmanno did not take the books, but sped away to make another plea to the Governor. The prisoners began to sing; there was no law to prevent that, they sang every international song they knew, in Italian and in English.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation;
A newer world’s in birth!

The rest of the prison heard no sound; but the searchlights flashed into their cells and kept them awake, and cries would run down the tiers of cells--hundreds of men shouting over and over: “Let them out! Let them out!” There was no one to interfere with them, for the guards, many of them, broke down and sobbed.

A singular adventure of Dorothy Parker, young poet from New York, sophisticated and ironical, but not liking official murder. She knew a newspaper reporter, and he got drunk, and volunteered to take her into the prison with him. He got her past the police-lines, and then went to get another drink, and never appeared again. So there was Dorothy, wandering about, patting the noses of state troopers’ horses, surveying the lines of guns, and testing Massachusetts prison discipline after bed-time. She sat with the reporters, and gathered the news, and then went to the telephone and called up Sacco-Vanzetti defense headquarters, and was overheard by a horrified deputy-warden--a spy of the enemy inside the defenses! A lovely story for bored reporters, smoking cigarettes and playing cards in the officers’ club, and begging for the tiniest item of news to put on the wires--starting with the mystic letters, “SV,” and ending with the promise: “Will be add.”

What was the supersalesman doing? Said Betty, “It is his idea of drama, to make publicity for himself!” But in this she was blinded by her hatred of the man. The plain truth was, he had decided to have the execution that night, and get it over with. But some of his advisers said it was impossible, with matters as they stood before the courts. Arthur Hill was arguing--a three hour argument before the Council. Up to the last half hour the issue hung in the balance, and swayed, now this way and now that.

Every preparation for death was made; the canvas cover was off the electric chair, and the current tested--the three victims listening to the sounds. They were dressed in their death-clothes--shirts with short sleeves and trousers with short legs, leaving room for the electrodes. But at ten-twenty the warden came to the reporters, his face wreathed in smiles, announcing that he had been notified by the Governor, the execution was “off” for that night. Wild excitement, and some joy, for the burly warden did not like his job the least bit. The reporters flashed the word “reprieve” to the farthest ends of the earth; but five minutes later the warden came in again, his face a blank--terribly sorry, he had further word from the Governor, the execution was “on” again, and was to take place at midnight.

The official witnesses who had been selected, and the one reporter, the Associated Press man, who had been favored above all other reporters, made ready to enter the death-house. But again the warden burst in, at twenty-seven minutes past eleven, almost in a state of collapse--he had had another talk with the Governor, and the execution was “off” for the next twelve days. The reporters leaped to the telegraph-keys--having before their minds a terrible calamity. There are newspapers in the big cities which make a practice of printing descriptions of things which haven’t happened, but are due to happen according to schedule; there would be New York papers having on their presses the news that the men were dead. Suppose some of these copies were to get onto the streets!

The “false execution”--such was the name by which the friends of the defense came to know that dreadful evening. They had sat in defense headquarters, and in a church behind the State House which had been mercifully opened to them, and waited for news, and pictured the worst. Rosina Sacco had sat for three hours holding a watch in her hand; when at last the news of the reprieve came in, she collapsed, and had to be carried to the home of friends. In the little apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill, Cornelia Thornwell was at the telephone, dizzy, but able to hear the voice of Deborah: “I told you, Mother! You should have believed me--he would not dare to disregard us.”