Chapter XXI: Days of Grace (1)

I

Sacco and Vanzetti, brought up from Dedham jail on the first day of July, had been put into the death cells. When the Governor granted the first reprieve of thirty days, to allow the Lowell Commission to work, they had been moved back to what was called the Cherry Hill section of the prison. On the first of August, it being ten days to the new date of execution, they went back into the death cells. Now, the Governor having granted twelve days more, the rules required another return to the Cherry Hill section. “Oh, this is wearisome!” exclaimed Sacco. “This moving!”

He was on the twenty-sixth day of a fast, and barely able to totter. But he would not be assisted; no, he would take care of himself. A slow, feeble procession, the guards at his side ready to catch him if he fell. Vanzetti walked behind; having broken his fast, he had a little strength. Out into the open sunshine in the prison yard; a glimpse of the flower-beds along the walk, of blue sky overhead, white clouds, and gray and white gulls wheeling; the sounds of freight cars being shunted in the Boston and Maine yards, on the other side of the prison walls. A few steps to be climbed; wait, let him alone, Nick would do it by himself. At last he was lying on his cot in the new cell; tortured, distracted--when his wife and son came to see him they found his mind wandering. He was in what is known as a “blind” cell, having a solid wooden door in front of the barred iron door, and a peep-hole through which the keepers could look in.

Vanzetti also was in such a cell, and had fits of frenzied protest against the long drawn out and senseless agony. He talked aloud at night, and disturbed the other prisoners. His words being mostly in Italian, the guards and reporters said they were “incoherent.” He shouted about “the machine, the machine!”--which they took to mean the electric chair; not understanding the social system which is crushing human hopes throughout the world, grinding up the souls and minds of millions. Vanzetti was told that his cries were keeping other men awake, and that if he kept it up, he would be put in the padded cell, known as the “Blue Room.” At this he became furious, and dragged his cot and wooden bureau in front of the door of his cell, and warned the guards that they would not get him out alive.

Cornelia heard that news, and came to the prison early in the morning. They had refused her admission to the death-cells--only relatives and attorneys were allowed there, a strict rule. Now they told her that Vanzetti was “dangerous,” but she laughed at them; Bart had never been dangerous to those who used the methods and the language of love. She told them that she could tame this wild man for them, and without padded cells or strait-jackets. Since they dreaded a scandal very much, they gave way and took her through the prison yard, and into the corridor of “blind” cells.

Poor Bart--a dreadful change from the early days in that prison, when he had been so eager to see her, yet made her wait while he washed the coal dust from his face and hands! And always carefully shaved, clear-eyed, and with his unconscious natural dignity. Now he lay in a dark hole, feeble and wasted, his hair falling out, his teeth decaying, a gray and wasted specter. He started up when he heard her gentle voice, but then had to sink back on the cot, for he grew dizzy if he got up suddenly.

Cornelia asked the guard to let him come out into the corridor and sit with her. She knew that he would be gentle. The prisoner answered that of course he would; but he was not fit to be seen. She promised not to look at him, and so he came, and she looked into his eyes, and smiled and began to talk. She had been to Plymouth a few days ago, to interview a witness for Musmanno; she had seen the Brinis, and had much news about the family. They had moved to a place on Cherry Court, and the baby was grown up. A hundred items of gossip--even the latest reports from Vincenzo’s garden, and the explosion which had occurred in his home-made wine!

And then news about that most precious of young creatures, Rupert Alvin Thornwell Randall--a mouthful of names. He was a sturdy one; two years old now, toddling and talking at a great rate; spending the summer at his grandmother’s country place on the North Shore, while his mother gave her time to the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. Betty had been so determined that this infant should grow up in a proletarian environment--but alas, it was midsummer, and hot in a little apartment, and out there on the North Shore were cool, refreshing breezes; so the grandparents had the precious one, completely surrounded by a battalion of servants, and all the demoralizing uses of luxury. Betty had to choose between saving one infant and saving the world--a dilemma frequently encountered by reformers. Cornelia told Bart a little about the family duel, which had been going on for two years; now the great banker and his wife had got their way. Bart said they always would, so long as they were able to control the things which other persons needed.

Vanzetti had been writing off and on, in spite of handicaps. He had a statement which he wanted Cornelia to revise; she might assure the warden that there was nothing in it like calling the Governor a “murderer,” which had made such a terrible scandal throughout all Massachusetts. He wanted to give her a lot of his manuscripts to keep--but she didn’t want to take them, because that would be admitting that he was going to die! In the course of their talk he developed signs of timidity, and said he had written something that he had wanted to show to her, but he was afraid maybe it wasn’t very good; it was a poem--a poem about a nightingale! Cornelia reassured him--it wouldn’t need to be very good in order for her to be interested in it. He drew it from the lot of papers, and read it to her: this “dangerous” one, sitting in the corridor of the “blind” cells, with a lynx-eyed guard watching every move and listening to every word. The poem began:

_When in the course of endless cosmic changes,
Upon the close of winter dark and drear
From far away, benignant, crowned with roses,
We see the lovely, longed-for spring appear...._

Cornelia had to tell the poet that such emotions had been expressed before; nevertheless, there were tears to her eyes over the effort of a wop in prison to describe a nightingale in Italy! Springtime in Villafalletto--the fruit trees in blossom and the vegetables thriving--and the poet behind bars, condemned to death! Was it because of her aching pity for the doomed idealist, or was there really beauty and pathos in the closing lines?

_Thus in my garden, in bright morning’s glow,
I saw thee in an April long ago._

II

Twelve days of grace had been granted to the defense. Twelve days in which to educate the world! Twelve days for lawyers to compose more briefs, packed full of legal formulas and imposing citations; to hop into automobiles or airplanes, and go hunting for judges, and argue, plead, insist--there could not be a total failure of law, when new evidence had been discovered, proving that innocent men were about to be executed. The judges would listen politely and patiently; but in all that long list, from the lowest to the highest, not one would think about anything but precedent, not one would act upon a basis of mercy or justice, political wisdom or ordinary common sense.

“Unless a million men can be mobilized in our defense, we are lost!” Such had been Vanzetti’s statement, two or three years ago. It had taken the United States government a year to mobilize a million men, and the Sacco-Vanzetti committee now set out to do it in twelve days. They drafted appeals and sent long telegrams--a great sum in tolls each day. Mass meetings were held in hundreds of American cities and towns, and in all the capitals of the world; the newspapers were full of reports of riots and strikes. But such events only stiffened the backs of the State House crowd; this was “Bolshevism,” and the answer to it was several thousand rifles with bayonets, and a plentiful supply of gas bombs and machine guns.

The one thing the State House crowd really feared was a general strike. That was the weapon which had saved the lives of Ettor and Giovannitti, and which might have saved Sacco and Vanzetti. The police were on the alert day and night for the first move towards it. Two Jews, officers of the cap makers’ union, started a movement for a strike among the clothing workers of Boston, and were arrested and framed on a bombing charge. The police hadn’t the slightest thing on them, and confessed it with a laugh when they released them--after the execution. There were spies everywhere, bringing word, hour by hour, of what was going on in all the centers of sedition. The ruling classes waited for the least little sign of violence, the least departure from the rôle of martyrdom--so odious and exasperating to those who believe in gold and steel.

The “highbrow” sympathizers labored to mobilize liberal opinion. They organized emergency groups and drafted appeals to the Governor, and collected signatures from leaders of every form of intellectual and artistic activity. It was a simple matter to get such persons to voice their horror at the idea of executing men after seven years on the rack, and when there were so many reasons for doubting their guilt. The trouble was that after the signatures were collected, there was nothing to do with them--except to take them to the State House, and turn them over to a man who read the _Saturday Evening Post_, and to whom a list of leaders of international thought was of less significance than a list of the delegates to an “ad-men’s” convention.

This salesman of motor cars posed as being completely impartial, and delighted to assure his visitors, “I don’t know what an anarchist is, I don’t pay any attention to that sort of stuff.” But right in the midst of these pretenses some researcher in Washington dug up his hate-speeches--the only ones of any consequence he had made during his four years’ service in Congress. He had been an ardent advocate of the exclusion of Victor Berger, the socialist congressman, and with hot anger had called for “the crucifixion of disloyalty, the nailing of sedition to the cross of free government, where the whole brood of anarchists, bolsheviks, I.W.W.’s and revolutionaries may see and read a solemn warning.” He had talked about the “red scum,” and the “agents of the red flag,” and had denounced opposition to preparedness as “a devilish scheme of undermining the morale of the people.” These tirades had been delivered just before a thousand men and women were dragged from their homes and thrown into Boston jails.

III

Not since the days of the Civil War had there been such a test of the consciences of men and women in Boston. Strange things happened, unexpected workings of the spirit. To Cornelia Thornwell in her little apartment came the second son of James Scatterbridge, known as “James’s Josiah,” and sat in a chair and fixed his pale blue, earnest eyes upon her, and in a timid, half-apologetic voice began, “Grandmother, it seems to me as if I ought to do something to help.”

“There is plenty to be done,” said the old lady.

“I decided I ought to contribute some money, so I went to defense headquarters yesterday evening. I had made up my mind to give half my vacation allowance. But while I was there three Italian laborers came in; you could see they had just come from the day’s work, their shoes were covered with mortar, and the backs of their hands had big knotted veins on them. They brought more than fifty dollars which they had collected on the job. I couldn’t understand what they said, but I watched their faces, and I realized it was money which their wives and children must need, so I got ashamed of myself. I think we all have too easy a time. I gave every cent I had, and now I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Lots of college boys go to work in vacation time, Josiah, and sometimes they learn more than in classes.”

“I know, Grandmother, and that’s what I’ll do; but first it seemed to me that I oughtn’t to let you and Betty and Joe carry the brunt of all this. Betty says she’s going to get arrested next Sunday, and it seems to me I ought to go, too. What do you think?”

Another family problem! Cornelia declined to solve it; she said that in matters of conscience, every person has to act for himself. “It will make your father very angry, of course.”

“I know; he’s terrible when he gets excited about the Reds. But I don’t think it’s quite the same as being a Red, to say that men ought not to be executed when there is so much doubt of their guilt. But I can’t get Father to see that at all. You’ll be shocked, I know, but he said they ought to be executed, anyhow.”

“I’ve heard many people say that, Josiah; it is almost a respectable opinion in Boston. A member of the Governor’s Council has voiced it, I am told.”

“We’re having a funny time at home right now,” continued the youth. “Have you heard about Great-uncle Abner? He is determined to break into the _Transcript_ with a letter about the case, and Father has promised Uncle Henry that he won’t let him--out of respect for you, of course.”

“I know,” said Cornelia. “It is very kind of them.”

“Father is provoked with you, but he won’t have any scandal, and he has been having all the servants bring Great-uncle Abner’s letters to him, instead of posting them. Great-uncle Abner found out about it, and there was a terrible row, you could hear him shouting all over the house: ‘Am I in jail or am I not in jail? Answer me that? Have I been legally committed? If not, take me out of here, and let me die a free man!’ He just wouldn’t give up, and Father had to pacify him, for fear he’d have another stroke. What Father did--you won’t believe it--he promised to send the letter to the _Transcript_, and he had a printer take the editorial page from an early edition, and reproduce it complete, with the page on the other side also--but with Great-uncle Abner’s letter in it. It was quite wonderful--it would have fooled anybody. They put it in the evening edition and brought it to the old gentleman, and he was as pleased as punch--read it about twenty times, and some of his old friends were let in on the secret, and came to see him and patted him on the back and said it was a great letter and ought to settle the case with the Governor. It said there ought to be a Bolshevik hanging from each tree on the Common, and they ought not to have any trials. It said that American institutions must be saved from rape at the hands of Russian gold and Italian dynamite. It was almost as bad as some of the letters that really get published!”

IV

The case worked also upon the consciences of persons who were cursed with artistic temperaments. Such unfortunates read the letters of Vanzetti and recognized a brother in distress. He who had made himself a master of English prose spoke to all other writers, now as in times to come. They gathered from far and near, anxious that a great soul and a prophet should be recognized before he was dead.

There came Arturo Giovannitti, compatriot and fellow-victim of the “frame-up” system: one of those whom Captain Proctor had set out to “get,” in the days of Proctor’s prime, before his conscience began to trouble him. For more than a year Giovannitti had lain in Salem jail, and had written a haunting poem, “The Walker.”

_One-two-three-four: four paces and the wall;
One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate._

Now he walked a somewhat longer road in front of the State House with the golden dome; measured, not by paces, but by minutes--one-two-three-four-five-six-seven. He went to the Common, temple of free speech with elm-tree limbs for arches. “Fellow-workers,” he began--being an I.W.W., that was his formula. “Break it up!” shouted “Mickey the Gunman.” “You’ve said enough!” But the poet protested: “I haven’t said anything yet! Wait till I finish before you arrest any one.” “You’re talking against the courts!” was the answer of the superintendent of police. “You’re not allowed to talk against the courts!” The mounted troopers drove their reluctant horses into the crowd. “Break it up! Move along there!”

John Dos Passos came, playwright and novelist, genial, gentle, and bold as a young bull buffalo. A graduate of Harvard, he came to save the honor of his alma mater. “You have put your name and indirectly the name of the university to an infamous document”--so he wrote to President Lowell; and then, since no Boston paper would publish his letter, he went out on the picket-line and exposed his head to the policemen’s clubs, and his skin to the vermin in the old Joy Street police-station.

“Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng!” There thronged George L. Teeple, of the class of ’97, and got himself arrested with the other pickets, and read a statement in court, paying fifteen dollars extra for the privilege, because the judge remarked that there might be an excuse for ignorant foreigners, but there was very little excuse for a Harvard man to violate the law.

Also Powers Hapgood, nephew of Norman and of Hutchins. His was not the sort of head the Boston police were used to breaking. He had completed four years’ work at Harvard in three; he had “made” the Dickey and the Hasty Pudding Club, the varsity track squad and the Harvard “Crimson.” He had been in the service abroad, and was one of the few undergraduates honored by election to the Harvard Memorial Society. He was one of those young Americans in whom readers of fiction refuse to believe; “unreal and made to order,” they say, of a college youth who travels over the country working in coal mines, and becoming a leader of the left wing miners. Now he came to express his opinion of President Lowell, and the opinion was such that official Boston shut it up in the Psychopathic Hospital.

Heywood Broun was carrying on the same fight in New York, as “colyumist” of the _World_, at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week. Broun had been “flunked out” of Harvard in his youth, and this may have made him feel disrespectful. “From now on,” he wrote, “will the institution of learning at Cambridge which we once called Harvard be known as Hangman’s House?” The _World_ published that, but refused to publish the next articles, so the “colyumnist” went on a “permanent strike,” which made an enormous sensation among the literati. An extraordinary thing, the way the case “got” the intelligentsia, even that portion which prides itself most upon being hard-boiled and immune to social emotions.

V

Also there came alumni of the University of Hard Knocks. Those foreign names which pleased the readers of Boston newspapers so little belonged to clothing-workers who had given up their jobs, and spent their savings to come and jeopardize their skulls; to sailors from the port, to iron-workers, barbers, bakers and waiters; also to poets and writers who had educated themselves, and thus could understand the soul of Vanzetti. There came Michael Gold, a young Jew from the slums of New York, who had been a newspaper reporter in Boston when not yet out of his teens, and had been one of that group of anarchist sympathizers whom Cornelia had seen, eleven years ago, accompanying Galleani to the Plymouth cordage strike.

Mike was now a playwright and editor of the _New Masses_, but resented being classified as an “intellectual,” and wanted to remain a worker; so he dressed in khaki, which gave a shock to Boston. He wandered about, fascinated by the spectacle of a city gone mad with fear. He listened to the conversation of sleek clerks and stock-brokers of State Street, ex-football players of Harvard who wished they might have a chance to tackle the “Reds.” He listened to taxi-drivers and soda-jerkers, who knew what they had read in a capitalist newspaper, or learned from others who had read it in some other capitalist newspaper. On the afternoon of the “false execution” he joined the “death march” in front of the State House, and the same two iron-handed cops who grabbed Dorothy Parker the poet grabbed Mike Gold the playwright, and hauled them away to the oddly-named Joy Street police station. “Hang them! Hang the anarchists!” cried the straw-hatted mob; and Mike, who had written a life of John Brown, saw the ghost of William Lloyd Garrison going down the street with a rope about his waist, followed by the “mob in broadcloth,” crying “Hang him! Hang the abolitionist!”

Those Boston merchants of a hundred years ago had been, some of them, the “bootleggers” of their day; smuggling “black ivory” from Africa, Negro slaves whose labor would be turned into molasses in Louisiana. The molasses would be brought to New England and made into rum, and the rum would go back to Africa, to make drunk the savage chiefs whose war-victims would compose the next bootleg cargo. Now the great-great-grandsons of those old merchants bore the same names, and looked so much like their ancestors that when they came up for election to the Somerset Club, the directors thought they were voting for the ancestors. These great-great-grandsons had imported hundreds of thousands of white niggers from the Mediterranean and Baltic lands, to operate their steam and electric machines, and had built a colossal system for the exploiting of this new slave labor. These new masters considered themselves civilized, and were willing to install “welfare work,” and have their wives “do charity.” But at the same time they looked upon these foreign hordes with mingled contempt and fear, and dreaded the day when they might refuse obedience. To suggest this to them was the worst crime that could be committed in modern New England; the “black abolitionists” of 1831 had been replaced, as objects of ruling class hatred, by the “red scum” of 1927.

So it was that Boston was under what amounted to martial law, and there were more detectives watching strangers than there were strangers. Any one who wore a beard, or had a dark face, was liable to be halted on the street and ordered to give an account of himself. A messenger carrying a box of seidlitz powders had to stop for a chemical analysis. Helen Black and Ann Washington Craton--a descendant of the father of her country--were arrested and taken to the police station and cross-questioned for hours; the reason assigned being that they “looked like New Yorkers.” Six Italians arrived in an automobile, and two of them needed a shave, so they were held on a bombing charge.

Joe Randall, of course, was a marked man; the fact that he wrote articles for newspapers and posed as a reporter only made him worse than the other “Bolsheviks.” Detectives followed him everywhere, in restaurants, in drug stores when he bought an ice cream soda, in barber shops when he got a shave. He made trouble for them by insisting upon talking with them, which was destructive of morale and against the ethics of “shadowing.” New “dicks” were substituted, but Joe said you could always recognize them by their blank and stupid faces; there was no other occupation by which such low-grade persons could manage to be well-dressed and well-fed.

Impossible to imagine anything more grotesque than the activities of these anthropoid mentalities, trying to deal with a world of which they had no gleam of understanding. Some of the things they did were beyond the absurdities of musical comedy. Heywood Broun’s wife, Ruth Hale, came to Boston at the height of the tragedy. Two sleuths of the city spent the night in a Ford car, keeping watch on Hanover street, opposite defense headquarters, and in the morning a newspaper man asked them what they had been doing, and the answer was, “We had a straight tip on a bomb-plot, and we were watching for the bombers.” “Who are they?” asked the reporter. The reply was, “Two women from New York, Ruth Hale and Dorothy Parker.”

VI

On Thursday, the eleventh, Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court allowed a bill of exceptions from his ruling to go to the Full Court. Also Web Thayer was persuaded, for the sake of appearance, to permit exceptions to his rulings to be carried up. So there were two more hopes for salvation from the courts; Massachusetts was going to lean over backwards in respecting the legal rights of two convicted wops. Chief Justice Rugg was ill, and Crosby was in Europe; Sanderson was barred from considering his own ruling, so there were Braley, Wait, Carroll, and Pierce, with Braley, oldest member, presiding. He issued a summons for a special sitting on the following Tuesday, to listen to arguments of counsel.

Hope once more in the hearts of all believers in law and order. Surely the ruling group was coming to its senses; it had realized the frightful blunder it was making, and had chosen a dignified way to back down! Patience now, and keep cool, and don’t do anything to excite public feeling, and make it harder for the learned justices! Stop the wild talk, and keep the New York radicals off the streets and out of the newspapers! Above all, no disorders on the Common, nor in front of the State House! So argued the “respectables.”

Was there really a chance? Or was it merely that those in charge of affairs wanted it to seem that way? Quincy Thornwell came to his Aunt Cornelia, bringing rumors: the Governor had talked with So-and-so, and had said this and that. More important yet, Mr. Lowell was showing signs of weakening; he was defending himself, for the first time in his long life. One of the “middle minds” had been to see him, and he had argued until two o’clock in the morning, trying to justify his decision; he had been so anxious about it that he had followed his visitor downstairs in his pajamas, and out into the garden, flashing a torchlight into the bushes to make sure there were no bombers hiding. Quincy Thornwell chuckled over the picture: assuredly the strangest sight ever witnessed by the chaste nymphs who haunt the shades of the classic elms of Harvard!

And then the learned justices of the Supreme Judicial Court, actually giving signs of humanity! Justice Wait had made a speech, defending the action of the court; and now here was the wife of another one, the presiding justice, Braley, telephoning to Mrs. Jessica Henderson; a Leach of Bridgewater she was, a highly respected person, and twice she called up to say: “Don’t worry, my dear, everything is coming out all right, I assure you. They are not going to let them be executed, they will find some way out. The judge does not believe in capital punishment.” What could have been the meaning of that? Could it be that these old boys were fooling their own wives, in the effort to cheer them up and keep peace in the family? Or were they using the wives to lull the defense, and damp the dangerous agitation during the critical days? Impossible to guess.

VII

In the Sacco-Vanzetti committee the never-ceasing struggle between those who wanted to be judicious and those who wanted to make propaganda. Lawyers and college professors telephoning in, or calling to make personal pleas: “Remember this is Boston, and keep the New York nuts out of the limelight!” But the “New York nuts” had something to say about that, and so had the Boston newspapers. The visitors came hiking, wearing oil-cloth placards over their shoulders, getting cursed and nearly mobbed in each respectable town they passed through. They came in sport-cars, with bootleg bottles in their baggage. Girls came in pants, and men with no hats or neckties. One brought a portable typewriter, ready for work, and when he found no room in headquarters, he set himself up on the curbstone outside the Hotel Bellevue, and started writing letters for Sacco and Vanzetti. The newspapers, of course, got pictures of him at once. Also they eagerly interviewed a young man who announced his intention of marching to Dedham jail to rescue Sacco and Vanzetti, and was disconcerted to learn that his campaign maps were out of date.

Such were the surface aspects of the invasion, easy to see and to record. But there was another aspect, not so obvious to Boston newspapermen, nor so diverting to their readers. The soul of the demonstration, a common feeling which animated all the participants, men and women, old and young, rich and poor, educated and ignorant: a sense of black despair, of agonizing littleness in the face of a colossal evil; an impotent rage, a hatred, bitter as gall, rolling up in their minds, for this whole great city of greed masked by bigotry--smug and polite and treacherous, cultured and correct and deadly.

Very few of these agitators were professionals; not many of them had any training, any party to guide and support them. They came as individuals, hesitating and confused. They didn’t like to do what they were doing; the women, and many of the men, felt like Lady Godiva riding through the town naked--worse even than she, because they had no certainty of accomplishing anything; perhaps they were making fools of themselves to no purpose at all.

They came because American labor would not come. Vanzetti had called for a million workers, and the million workers answered, “What the hell?” Most of them were content for Vanzetti to die--so that American prosperity might live; they were ready to make that sacrifice to Moloch, precisely as the mothers and fathers of Carthage were ready to put their infants into the red-hot iron arms of the god, so that Carthage might live. So, instead of the million workers, came one or two hundred poets, painters, dreamers and lovers of beauty, Greenwich Villagers, bums, bohemians--whatever names Boston, the correct and murderous, might choose to call them. A pitiful little group, throwing themselves against the iron battlements of American capitalism, with its machine-guns and poison gas bombs, its police in the front rank and army and navy in reserve.

And for every dreamer who came, there were thousands who stayed at home, chained by poverty, or a greater share of timidity; waiting, waiting, with a ghastly sense of uncertainty, feeling themselves more effectively imprisoned than Sacco and Vanzetti. Writing letters, but not knowing if they were read; sending telegrams--like shooting arrows into the dark! Unable to get any real news--a few bare events each day in the papers, but no opinions, no guidance, no light. The radio grinding out its eternal silly thumping of drums and whining of saxophones--this greatest story in modern American history not worth a moment’s attention!

VIII

Sunday was coming, and what was the committee going to do? Was there to be another meeting on the Common, or should they oblige the lawyers and wait? Agonized arguments, turning into bitter quarrels. “When did you come into this case?” the old-timers would jeer; and to that the answer was obvious: “A fine mess you made of it!” The communists would rage at the members of the committee: “Do you think you own Sacco and Vanzetti? What do you want--to put their ashes in an urn and set it on your parlor mantel?”

Some were determined to speak on the Common, committee or no committee, police or no police. The Socialist Labor Party had a permit not yet confiscated, and the Sacco-Vanzetti defenders would use that; so it was announced, and the would-be martyrs prepared placards on canvas, which could be folded up and hidden under the clothing. Betty and Joe refused to tell the family what they were going to do; so here came Deborah in all her majesty, mixing with the “mob” on the Common, walking about unable to keep her hands quiet, so agitated she was. When it came to a test, she really did love her daughter, in spite of so many bitter words spoken during eleven years of wrangling. After all, it was “Boston”; conscience was conscience, and when you followed yours, you commanded respect from others who followed theirs. When the little group of white-faced men and women marched into the midst of armed ruffians, Deborah’s emotions were those which had been felt by patrician Roman matrons, when their Christian children walked into the arena among the lions.

Police Judge Zottoli, an Italian anxious to prove his respectability, had announced that for those arrested in future “the sky would be the limit.” But evidently among those in authority there must have been some wiser heads. The police had orders to disperse all gatherings, to allow no speeches, but to do as little arresting as possible; no more martyrs--and especially no well-dressed ones! A curious experience for young ladies who lived on Beacon Street, within sight of this greensward; they were made to leap out of the way of mounted troopers, they had their placards taken away, and their arms squeezed black and blue--but always the last word was, “Move on! Keep moving!” Were these the traffic officers who had been helping them across street-crossings, and knew them? Or were they detectives who had been keeping watch over the wedding presents in fashionable homes?

The permit which the Sacco Vanzetti committee had hoped to obtain was found to be unavailable; so those who attempted to speak would all be outlaws. They brought soap-boxes--and the “cops” took them away and broke them up. For Joe Randall two young martyrs upon a sudden impulse got down and made a soap-box of their backs; on this precarious pedestal Joe stood, and began: “Fellow-citizens of Massachusetts, we are here to assert the fundamental principles of free speech”--and that was all, for there were three husky “dicks” who had been following Joe about the field, and grabbed him by the arms and pulled him from his platform and led him away.

Joe had made one concession to his anxious grandmother-in-law, he would not resist and get his head broken; he went quietly--and only when he was out on Beacon Street did he discover the scurvy trick which had been played upon him. The three huskies gave him a shove and said, “Move along now, young fellow, and keep moving.” “What do you mean, am I not under arrest?” “Move along, buddy, what do you want to get into trouble for?” When he tried to force his way back, they held him. They would not fight him, they would merely block his way, and see that he didn’t get to the Common. Later on, when Joe learned that the same thing had happened to “James’s Josiah,” he realized that it could not have been an accident; some member of an all-powerful family had called in a detective agency, and paid a fancy price to keep his relatives out of jail, and his family name out of the papers!

It was Powers Hapgood who made the real fight that Sunday before the last; Powers, with a young Italian sewing-machine repairer named Cosimo Carvotta, who got inspired by Powers’ eloquence, and insisted on rescuing him from the entire police force of the City of Boston. Cosimo had upon him a pocket-knife containing a small screw-driver, an inch long, used upon sewing-machines; he did not try to use it, but they found it in his pocket at the police station, and it was enough to constitute a “dirk,” and make a startling story in the papers.

As for Powers, he had a highly honorific arrest, performed by Superintendent Crowley and a captain and a sergeant and other majesties. “I insist on the right of free speech! The people must save Sacco and Vanzetti! We must not allow our comrades to be murdered! Don’t forget, Comrades--keep it up--save the men!”--thus the member of the Dickey and the Hasty Pudding Club and the Harvard Memorial Society, being dragged away to the police-box at the corner of Charles and Beacon streets. “Mickey the Gunman” himself pulled the hook which summoned the patrol-wagon, and within five minutes there were a hundred officers at the spot, and a squadron of mounted men to drive back the crowd.

IX

The special sitting of the Supreme Judicial Court was set for Tuesday the sixteenth at ten o’clock. Six hours before that came a dreadful event; some one put dynamite on the front porch of the home of one of the Sacco-Vanzetti jurors, in East Milton, and blew out the front of the house. Once more the authorities were certain that this had been the work of friends of Sacco and Vanzetti; whereas the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti were equally certain that it was the work of their worst enemies. They called attention to the peculiar placing of the dynamite, to make a loud noise and not hurt any one; they called attention to its exact timing--when it would do the utmost possible harm and least possible good to the defense.

The mystery was never solved; but the Governor took occasion to write a letter to the juror, denouncing those who were trying to “coerce the courts,” and at the same time assuring the victim that the cost of repairing his home would be paid by the Commonwealth. A singular impulse of generosity from an official who just recently had vetoed a bill providing for compensation to state employees who had been injured in the performance of their duties!

With the crash of this bomb echoing in their ears, the four black-robed justices assembled. The courthouse, and Pemberton Square around it, presented a scene of war. Benches were placed for barriers in front of courtroom doors, and Cornelia had to exhibit the contents of her handbag before she entered the room. She noticed that detectives assigned the little group of “Reds” to special seats, and then stood near them. Most of the crowd did not get in at all.

There sat in a row, behind a long raised desk, the four white-haired old gentlemen who held the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti in their hands. Henry King Braley, former city solicitor and mayor of Fall River, now seventy-seven years of age; Edward Peter Pierce, recently tried for misconduct, and convicted of very bad taste, seventy-five years of age; James Bernard Carroll, former city solicitor of Springfield, seventy-one years of age; and William Cushing Wait, former city alderman of Boston, sixty-seven years of age. Braley was a fellow-alumnus of Thayer’s, Pierce and Wait were fellow-alumni of Katzmann’s, while Carroll was a graduate of Holy Cross, which made him a fellow-alumnus of St. Peter. They told their fellow-alumni Arthur Hill and Arthur Reading, that they might have all the time needed; and then they sat, like four black-and-white images, motionless and impassive, while Mr. Hill recited the list of the high crimes of their fellow-alumni, Thayer and, indirectly, Katzmann.

Mr. Hill spared nothing of the story of “Web’s” prejudice and the manifold proofs thereof. Also he asked a hearing for the new evidence--of which more was coming in every day. He called it “monstrous” to maintain that there was any stage in the process of taking men’s lives when it ceased to be possible to present newly discovered evidence to establish their innocence. “It is the bench and bar of Massachusetts that is on trial,” he declared. “It is our entire system of criminal law.” He might have added “our entire system of criminal capitalism,” but his vision did not extend that far, and very surely he could not have made it clear to four members of the Union Club of Boston.

Then came the genial Mr. Reading, with pockets stuffed with the money of the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.” He asserted his solemn faith that Judge Thayer had been just and unprejudiced; nor was he in the least afraid of being “monstrous” in reciting the law which specified that after sentence had been pronounced by the trial judge, no motion for a new trial could be entertained, no matter what the new evidence might be. The four old gentlemen mumbled a few questions to the lawyers, impossible for the spectators to hear; and then they gathered up their books and papers, and the session was adjourned. The friends of Sacco and Vanzetti went home, to continue that process of waiting in which they had become so expert in the course of seven years, three months, and eleven days.

X

But they did not have to wait very long this time. Massachusetts took pride in paying no heed to “outside clamor,” but here was a different situation--a military expense of great sums every day, and enormous losses to retail trade. It was a time for sleepy old gentlemen to wake up and earn their keep. On Tuesday the hearing, on Friday the decision--an unprecedented procedure!

The document was written by Justice Braley, that oldest gentleman whose wife had more than once telephoned to Jessica Henderson, assuring her that everything was all right, no need to worry, the judge did not believe in capital punishment. Now the judge spoke for himself. With the other three judges concurring, he said that the legal system of the great Commonwealth was infallible, and the fact that it contravened decency, humanity, and common sense was of no significance. A long decision, highly technical, bristling with citations; the heart of it in one dreadful sentence: “A motion for a new trial in capital cases comes too late if made after sentence has been pronounced.” Such is the law of the Brahmins and the Blue-bloods, which altereth not! “The exceptions are overruled.”

Horror among so-called “liberals,” those of Boston, as well as those who had come from outside! They had staked all their hopes upon the courts; they had pleaded, argued, practically forced the defense committee to obey, to let them handle it, to put their trust in the processes of law. And here suddenly was the ghastly fact revealed in all its nakedness--there was no law! There was only the class struggle! Exactly as Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been saying for twelve years, ever since Cornelia had first met him: there was a propertied class, and there was a laboring class, and between them there was a war!

And now a battle under way, and the lines drawn, and deserters hated and punished--if necessary, killed! The immense, rich, eager, nervous, implacable young Empire was smashing a revolt of its slaves, crucifying its resisting gladiators by the roadside for a warning to all the rest! This legal decision was a searchlight, flashing suddenly upon that bloody deed! The Sacco-Vanzetti case was no longer the casual venality of a few local politicians, no longer the accidental malice of one elderly legal despot; the Sacco-Vanzetti case was capitalist government, the same in America as everywhere else in the world--the will of a predatory class!

Once before America had been like that, when the slave power had ruled it, and in those old days New England had had one poet with the gift of ecstasy and prophetic rage. A fugitive slave was sent back from Massachusetts, and Whittier, the Quaker abolitionist, pictured Liberty marching handcuffed down the street--

_And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong,
Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod,
Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God
The blasphemy of wrong...._

_“Mother of Freedom, wise and brave,
Rise awful in thy strength,” I said;
Ah me! I spake but to the dead;
I stood upon her grave!_

XI

A dreadful ordeal for the whole prison had been that “hungry strike” of Sacco’s. They didn’t want him to die that way--it was against the rules, and an impropriety; also they were sorry for him, and for his wife and child. They argued and pleaded; the wife and child argued and pleaded, but Nick was obdurate; he would not eat. Neither would he sign any papers for capitalist courts or governors; he would not ask for mercy or for pardon--he was an innocent man, and would die protesting it.

On the thirty-first day of the fast he became so weak that the prison doctor decided to act. He brought some hot beef broth to the cell, and reminded Nick how very painful it was to be fed by a tube through the nose. He went so far as to take hold of Nick’s nose, and say that he was going to pour the broth down his throat. So Nick gave up, and drank. They had all their strength, and he had little of his.

Then came young Musmanno, devoted slave of the case, broken-hearted, and shrinking from the job he had to do. They took him first to the cell of Nick, who was eating something. Said the young lawyer: “You are a brave man, aren’t you, Nick?”

It was the correct psychology; Nick said, quietly, “Yes, I think I am.”

“Well then, I must tell you that the Full Court has turned down our appeal.”

“I expected it,” said Nick, quietly. “What are they there for?” He did not wince; but he pushed his bowls and dishes aside and forgot them. “Sure,” he said, “they have us, they will kill us. We will die like men.” Then he said, “I will write a letter to Dante. You will come for that, Musmanno, I want the bimbo to have it when he gets older, and will be able to think about it.” “Bimbo” is an Italian endearment for a boy; and Musmanno said he would come without fail.

He went to Vanzetti, the man of emotions, of words rather than of actions. When Bart heard the news, his eyes opened wide like saucers, and he sat staring before him, as if he were in a dream. He got up, and began pacing his cell wildly, shouting in Italian. “There is nobody more innocent in all this world!” He would not take it as a matter of course that a man should die; he was a propagandist, and had reason to live. “A million men! A million men!” he cried. He began to demand that a microphone be brought to his cell, so that he might speak to the workers of the world. Musmanno had to say that both these propositions were equally impossible. All they could do was to make more appeals before more judges. He was leaving for Washington that night, to file an application before the United States Supreme Court.

The young lawyer came back late in the afternoon, but found that Nick had not been able to work upon the letter to his son. They had moved him back into the death cells for the third time. “Oh, this is wearisome!” He lay, very weak, his mind unsteady. He could only say, “I can’t understand it. They will kill us?” Vanzetti was sunk in melancholy, and would say nothing except, “My sister! My sister!”

Luigia Vanzetti landed in New York that day; a quiet, thin, sad-faced little woman in a faded brown traveling cloak, coming second class, her name kept off the passenger list of the great liner. A strange fate to have befallen a simple woman of an Italian village; in Paris she had been set to march at the head of a huge parade of workers. Now, bewildered by throngs coming to greet her, and by urgent young newspapermen of this strange land of hustle and sensation, she clutched a gold medallion of the Madonna in her hand; relying upon this ancient magic to save her unhappy brother, whom she had not seen for nineteen years. She hoped to convert him, she said; “I will ask him to see a priest, and return to the faith of his childhood, of those happy days before he left us.” Felicani and Rosina Sacco had come to meet her, and persuaded her to soft-pedal that aspect of her mission. As it turned out, she was no more able to save her brother’s soul than she was to save his life.

XII

Henry Cabot Winters had to postpone important legal conferences, worth at least a thousand dollars a day to him, to come and comfort his distracted mother-in-law; to argue with her, explain to her--or just listen to her. “Yes, I know, Mother, it seems very wrong that new evidence cannot be considered; my judgment is, the Supreme Court won’t stand by that ruling very long--they’ll reverse it, or the law will be changed. But this time they must have it. You see, this Sacco-Vanzetti evidence is not real evidence to them--it’s just more wops telling the same old lies, and every one is tired of it.”

“Too tired to consider the good of our courts, Henry!”

“It’s just the other way to them, Mother--they think they are standing by the courts. You must realize the dilemma; how can they throw Web down?”

“It would seem to me that Web has thrown them down.”

“Web has been a vulgarian, of course. But after all, what he said is what everybody thinks; and he’s been game, you have to admit that--he had a nasty job, and he stuck to it like a little soldier. For seven years he’s risked being shot or dynamited every hour of his life; and now, to repudiate him--it can’t be thought of.”

“Couldn’t they find some other ground to grant a new trial?”

“It’s all very well to talk about new trials as a matter of propaganda; but if you mean it seriously, stop and think. With this agitation and uproar--how could there be a trial? You couldn’t get a jury in a hundred years. Look at what happened to those people in East Milton! Think of the witnesses--appearing and testifying, with dynamite exploding all around them!”

“We wouldn’t need dynamite for those witnesses, Henry; with what we know about them to-day, there isn’t one who would dare take the stand.”

“All right, grant that is true--where does it leave us? It comes to this, the Commonwealth has had two Reds within a few minutes of the electric chair, and now has to admit that it has no real evidence, the whole thing blows up. We might just as well hand our courts over to the Bolsheviks and be done with it. We’d never be able to convict another one.”

“So, Henry, you are going to send two innocent men to death, because it would be embarrassing to admit a blunder!”

The lawyer smiled patiently. “Don’t get to believing your rhetoric, and putting it off on me, Mother! You asked me what is in the minds of the Supreme Court, and I am telling you. When I talk to lawyers about it, and bring them to admit that maybe the evidence is weak, that is the argument they end up with--the courts must be sustained.”

“A brand new idea of justice, Henry!”

The other smiled again. “On the contrary, an idea as old as courts themselves.” He cited the pronouncement of some fine old Tory judge to a too-urgent plaintiff: “It were better that you be ruined, than that the law be changed for the likes of you!” Henry was no legal scholar; but because he lived in Boston, it was necessary for him to possess some handy learning, for public purposes. He told his mother-in-law that this pungent saying went back even farther; it was in Law-French, which is a barbarous combination of old Norman-French with bastard Latin. He wrote it out, in an effort to divert the poor soul’s mind for a few moments. “Que est ceo a nous? Il est mieulx qu’il soit tout defait, que la ley soit chaunge pur luy.”

XIII

Cornelia insisted that she had to see the Governor once more, to plead with him for mercy. Even granting the worst, these men had been on the rack for seven years, and surely that was punishment! Henry said that would not get her very far; Fuller was a Roman senator, he believed in a life for a life. He had not pardoned a single man during his two terms as governor, and he had shortened only one sentence. But Cornelia, being a very old lady, was entitled under the Boston law to have her way; so Henry called up and made an appointment for her the next morning, and promised to come take her.