Chapter XXI: Days of Grace (2)

A great crowd in front of the State House, more picketing having been announced. Policemen so plentiful, they could have touched hands all the way along the front of the great building. Much scrutiny of those who came into the building--but Cornelia and Henry being obviously of the ruling caste, the guards took one glance and passed them on. Crowds of people in the corridors outside the executive chambers, reporters hungry as a shoal of fish; but etiquette of course forbade the old lady and her escort to talk to them. They were escorted into an inner office to wait.

The Governor’s time was given up entirely to the hearing of pleas. People came in groups, every sort--lawyers, clergymen, social workers, labor leaders, writers--he saw them, and took pleasure in putting to each lot his string of “posers”: Did you attend the trials? Have you read the record? Have you talked with the witnesses? Then what do you know about the case? When they set out to tell what they knew, he would not always listen. Said Arthur Garfield Hays, attorney from New York: “I wish to talk to you about the Department of Justice files.” Said the Governor: “Who wrote that editorial in the _World_?”

Cornelia was escorted to her seat in the torture-chair, and the automatic smile and the cold agate eyes were fixed upon her. Other eyes also: Mr. Joseph Wiggin, the Governor’s personal attorney, and Attorney-General Reading, and another lawyer. They never left him alone now, there must be witnesses to every word he said, and expert football players to employ what was known as “interference”--jumping in and protecting him, to keep him from revealing his ignorance about the case.

It was as Henry had said--he was a Roman senator, and did not want to talk about mercy. He wanted to pin this old lady down, and vent his exasperation at the trouble she had caused him. He did not say in so many words that she was to blame for all the lunatics carrying placards outside on the street, but that was the meaning of his attitude. Since his decision had been announced, he no longer had to pose as open-minded; he might be the bitter advocate, asking questions, and not paying any attention to her answers. “If Vanzetti was an innocent man, why didn’t he take the stand at Plymouth? Why leave his alibi to a twelve-year-old boy?”

“He produced eighteen alibi witnesses, Governor, and he could have got more if his lawyers had worked. We have found a dozen since.”

“If Sacco and Vanzetti were good men as you say, why were they intimate with a man like Boda?”

“But what have you against Boda, Governor?”

“I have sources of information, Mrs. Thornwell.”

“Boda was brought into the trial, and even Judge Thayer had to throw him out. They dragged in all that tale about the Coacci shed, and about Boda’s little Overland car--on purpose to make the jury think they had a bandit-gang--”

“I don’t understand you, Mrs. Thornwell; there is nothing in the record about Boda’s Overland car.”

“Why, Governor, of course it is there! I heard it in court, and I have read it a hundred times.”

“You are mistaken, I am certain.” It was a great man speaking. “Wiggin, is there anything in the record about Boda’s Overland car?”

“Nothing, Governor, that I have ever seen.”

What could Cornelia say? She could challenge him, of course, demand the record, and show him; or she could offer to send him the citation in a couple of hours. But what effect would it have, except to annoy him? Several persons had had this same experience, and had told her about it. Three times in the course of a brief interview, Cornelia would have to let him make incorrect assertions about the record. She must be tactful, and try to keep him smiling; for he was a man, and a Roman, and he did not like women butting in, arguing, correcting. Woman’s place was the home!

XIV

The salesman of motor-cars rested upon the authority of greater minds than his own. “Mrs. Thornwell, I appointed a commission to investigate this case, and I assure you, if a single one of those gentlemen had thought there was a doubt of the men’s guilt, I would not have taken this stand. But here you have three impartial referees--”

“Judge Grant had expressed a belief in their guilt before you appointed him, Governor.”

“I have heard that gossip, but you should not repeat such a thing unless you know it to be true.”

“But Judge Grant has written his opinion of Italians--he practically called them a nation of pickpockets.”

“Where do you get that? I never heard such a tale!”

“I have the book upon my table at home, Governor, and I will send it to you if you wish.”

But what he wished was to change the subject quickly. “I have had witnesses coming to this room for two months--person after person, assuring me of their identifications--”

“But Governor, even Judge Thayer had to throw out the identification testimony before he got through with this case!”

“What do you mean--throw it out?”

“I thought you had studied Judge Thayer’s decisions. In his 1924 decision he said: ‘These verdicts did not rest, in my judgment, upon the testimony of the eye-witnesses.’”

“What did he say they rested upon?”

“Upon the consciousness of guilt.” So then the Governor hastened to talk about the consciousness of guilt. Sacco and Vanzetti had lied when they were arrested, and they had lied on the stand, and their lies were manifest and had been exposed, so that no sensible person would dispute them.

“Granting your argument, Governor--”

“So you are prepared to admit that there was perjury in the case?”

“I am trying to find out where the argument leads us. If both sides made up testimony--and certainly we know that there was a great deal of it on the side of the prosecution--”

“I don’t know anything of the sort, Mrs. Thornwell.”

“You must know that Erastus Corning Whitney perjured himself.”

“Erastus what? I never heard of any such witness. Do you know of any such, Wiggin?”

Cornelia broke in. “Pardon me, Governor, I was not setting a trap for you. Erastus Corning Whitney is the real name of the man who took the stand and swore that his name was Carlos E. Goodridge, and thereby manifestly perjured himself. So, as I say, if we assume perjury on both sides--”

“Then we can say that one cancels the other.”

“Pardon me if I point out the fallacy, Governor. To begin with, the prosecution has to establish a case. When you wipe out the witnesses of the prosecution, one by one, as we have done by our new evidence, there is no case left, and under the law the men are innocent--quite regardless of whether some of their Italian friends may have taken the stand and made false alibis for them.”

“Why should innocent people have to be defended by perjury, Mrs. Thornwell?”

“For only one reason that I know, Governor--that they know positively the other side is preparing a perjured case against them. We have established that, but we have never had any judgment upon it, except that of Judge Thayer.”

One of the lawyers here considered it advisable to justify the high fees which the Governor was paying him out of his private purse to sit day by day and listen to these wrangles. “Mrs. Thornwell,” he interposed, “you overlook the fact that the Supreme Judicial Court has passed upon Judge Thayer’s rulings. As good citizens, we must have some belief in the competence and disinterestedness of our highest court.”

Cornelia turned her brown eyes upon him. These eyes had somehow lost their softness, and had a sparkle that might be malice. “Are you going to advance that doctrine in your new brief on the Jerry Walker case?”

“My God!” thought the legal gentleman, and it took all his blue-blood inheritance and Harvard training to keep his annoyance from showing on his face. He relapsed into dignified silence, and pretended not to see the look of mischief which his enemy Henry Cabot Winters shot at him. Truly a comical situation: This gentleman, who was counsel for the Governor in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, also was one of the counsel for Jerry Walker, and was on the point of filing before the Supreme Court of the United States an application for a writ of certiorari, to take that case away from the highest court of Massachusetts and reverse its decision. In that application the lawyer and his associates were going to make the most outrageous charges--implying that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had become a “house of refuge for the rich and powerful,” and declaring flatly that the judgment of the Full Court was “made in bad faith,” and that “there is nothing more odious than judicial favoritism,” which in this case had been “exercised in favor of bankers.” A marvelous thing, that flexibility of the legal mind, which can hold two diametrically opposite opinions at the same time; sorting out truth and error into two baskets, as it were, and carrying both to market, one in the right hand and one in the left!

XV

But it didn’t do Cornelia a bit of good to score points like that; it only made these gentlemen hate her. She must swallow her indignation, and come back to beg for mercy. “Remember, Governor, you must be _sure_. You are doing something that can never be undone. There is an old saying--I don’t know who is the author--that ‘only an infallible judge should pass an immutable sentence.’”

“Do you know that those men are innocent, Mrs. Thornwell?”

“Of course I don’t know that; how could I know it--unless I had been with them at the time? But I have been studying the case for seven years, and I believe that they are innocent, and certainly I know this--that they have not been proved guilty. I know all that I need to know--that they did not have a fair trial.”

“Well,” said the Governor, “I know that they are guilty, so I don’t care whether they had a fair trial or not.”

Cornelia stared at him; she was so taken aback by the remark that she could hardly believe she had heard it. “You know they are guilty, Governor Fuller?”

“I know it.”

“But how can you know it, unless there was a fair trial--somewhere, somehow--to establish it?”

“I have sources of information, Mrs. Thornwell, which I am not at liberty to reveal. You should find out what the Italian colony thinks about this case.”

“Governor, what are you saying? Some one has come and whispered into your ear, and you have been willing to believe it!”

“You cannot expect witnesses to tell all they know in the face of such peril as has been created in this community, Mrs. Thornwell.”

“So then, it is exactly as Vanzetti said to me--for weeks he has been saying it: ‘We are being murdered by the whispers of unknown men!’ Boston has gone back to the days of Russia under the tsars, of Turkey under the sultans, of China under the mandarins! Spies come and whisper secrets, and our rulers execute men upon words which they cannot or dare not produce in open court!”

One of the lawyers thought he had better justify his fees again. “Surely it is not quite so bad as that, Mrs. Thornwell--”

“It is so bad that it cannot be worse! And I implore you, Governor Fuller--consider, before you take this fatal step, which will blast the rest of your life! You are executing men upon secret testimony--but I tell you, the world will insist upon knowing what that testimony is! History will never let you alone until you tell what it is! And when mankind has learned that it was the whispers of spies--the gossip of what you are pleased to call ‘the Italian colony’--then you will face such a blast of indignation as no man can face and live!”

After that they did not want to listen to her any more. After that she was a distracted old woman who had fallen under the influence of sinister “Reds,” and lost entirely her mental balance. All they desired was to keep her from wasting the time of a busy and important public man. They would be polite, of course--even in Russia and Turkey and China the high officials were doubtless polite to old ladies of the ruling caste. “Glad to have seen you again, Mrs. Thornwell. I will give my best consideration to what you have said.” So Cornelia made her way out through the crowds, with tears in her eyes for all the newspapermen to see and report.

“Henry,” she asked, when they had got by themselves, “what can those whispers be?”

Said the lawyer, “There’s a man in that State House crowd who will talk with me, and I’ll see if I can find out.”

XVI

Michael Angelo Musmanno was in Washington, haunting the empty chambers of the United States Supreme Court. The justices were on vacation, but he lodged in the office of the clerk the two appeals from the Massachusetts courts. He entered the formal appearance of Hill and himself, paid the docketing fees, and the only thing remaining to perfect the appeals was the record of the case, which the clerk of the Dedham court had promised to send but which had not yet arrived. This was later secured, and duly filed.

But this procedure did not of itself postpone the execution, and Monday midnight was the hour set. Would any judge order a stay of execution? The lawyers were rushing to this one and that; it was a free-lance matter now, every man for himself--but still they found time to form opinions of one another. The Boston lawyers thought they knew Boston; they were conservative, and did things in a dignified manner, and held newspaper reporters off at the end of a ten-foot pole. The New Yorkers, on the other hand, were radicals, fighting in the open, and welcoming the reporters as allies. They accused the Boston crowd of being jealous about the case--“acting like a bunch of prima donnas!” said one.

Also among the committee, the frantic last-hour antagonisms between those who wanted to save Sacco and Vanzetti as human beings, and those who wanted to make them into symbols of the class war. Hardly a telegram could be sent, or a statement given to the press, that did not involve the controversy. The differences of ideas had become embodied in personal antagonisms. The communists were collecting sums of money for the defense, and the committee charged that this money was not coming to them, but was being used for communist propaganda. The communists replied with charges that the committee was wasting its funds upon high fees to capitalist lawyers. Charges and counter-charges--to the great glee of the enemy. The whispering gallery which was the State House buzzed and hummed with gossip. The spies came running, and the Governor’s advisers were on tip-toe. “What are they doing now? What do they say about this? About that?”

The “New York nuts” organized another “death march.” This time it was led by Captain Paxton Hibben, diplomat, war correspondent, and army officer; dapper, erect, and with sharp little military mustaches. He knew all about marches and parades, of course, and Boston knew him because the _Transcript_ had slandered him and then had to retract and apologize. Hibben was a Harvard master of arts, and with him came Dos Passos and Hapgood, bachelors of arts, and therefore subordinates; also James Rorty, the poet; and Clarina Michelson, from Greenwich Village, a tireless soul who did the hard work; and several humble wage-earners with names never heard before on Beacon Street. They marched their allotted time--one-two-three-four-five-six-seven--with a captain of police holding a watch on them; then they were led off under escort, with the crowd hooting, and a few cheering.

At the corner of Joy Street, Captain Hibben, being in advance, commanded, sharply, “Files right!” The huge police sergeant who had him in charge looked at him, and said, “Were you in the service?” The answer was, “I was a captain in the 332nd Field Artillery in France.” “Well, Captain,” said the sergeant, “this is a strange place for you to be!” “If you knew as much about Boston as I do, you would be with me,” said Hibben; and in the old Joy Street police station, so oddly named, they had a chat. Hibben had more than one man’s share of adventures to tell; he had been second secretary in the American legation in old St. Petersburg, he had been a war correspondent in the Near East in the early days of the war, and secretary of the Russian Red Cross for the Bolsheviks; a Chevalier of the Order of St. Stanislaus (Russian), an Officer of the Order of the Redeemer (Greek), and of the Order of the Sacred Treasure (Japan). “Holy smoke!” said the police sergeant; and on Monday morning in court he was wholly unable to remember that he had seen this starred and beribboned diplomat on the picket-line, and so Hibben was discharged. The sergeant meant it for a favor, but it was a cause of vexation to the prisoner, who had prepared a ringing statement to read in court--and now it was a dud!

XVII

The three condemned men--Madeiros always with them!--had been moved back into the death-house; into the three little cells with clean, smooth white-tiled floors, and doors that were never opened--no guard ever entered and no prisoner ever came out, except to die. Six feet in front of the cells ran a painted line, beyond which no visitor was permitted to step; at least, it had never yet happened in the history of Massachusetts, which lives by precedent.

But now Luigia Vanzetti arrived in Boston, followed by a stream of reporters, eager to make the most of this human interest story--“sob stuff” is the technical name. A frail, pathetic woman, weighing not more than a hundred pounds, and looking for all the world like a New England school teacher--she was coming to the prison to meet her brother, whom she had not seen since he was a youth. She had come all the way from Villafalletto to help him die, and naturally she would wish to step over the painted line and clasp him in her arms. To obtain this favor all the eloquence of the ladies of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense was concentrated upon Warden Hendry. They came to his office and wept, and prayed, and stormed and scolded, until at last the Commonwealth of Massachusetts broke a precedent, for the first time in its three hundred years of history.

Bart was led out from his cell, and allowed to sit in a chair on the other side of the painted line. The warden himself brought Luigia, and two guards stood by to see that she did not give the condemned man any poison, or a revolver, or an Italian stiletto. They tottered into each other’s arms, sobbing; and in a moment more the woman collapsed, and one guard had to catch her, while the other brought a chair. Bart sat, patting her gently, and for an hour they talked about all the things which might interest a brother and sister who had parted in their teens, and met again in their middle thirties, with only two days more of life upon earth together.

The twelve-year-old Dante Sacco had come with Rosina and paid a last visit to his father; a terrible ordeal for a child, to pass that canvas-shrouded death-chair, and sit listening to a faint voice, and peering at a wasted shadow of a man through narrow steel bars which must not be approached. The boy and the mother went out sobbing, the latter hardly able to walk; each one of these visits was like a spell of illness to her. The father set himself to his last task, of writing the promised letter to the “bimbo”; to leave him some permanent message which he might study when he grew older. Pitiful, rambling words of a man trying to hold his faculties in the midst of torment, and to write in a foreign language--because the “bimbo” spoke that language, and was going to an American school. “Much I thought of you,” wrote the father, “when I was lying in the death-house--the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground, where there was all the life and the joy of liberty--just one step from the wall which contains the buried agony of three buried souls.... Yes, Dante, they can crucify our bodies to-day as they are doing but they cannot destroy our ideals that will remain for the youth of the future to come....

“Well, my dear boy, after your mother had talked to me so much and I had dreamed of you day and night, how joyful it was to see you at last. To have talked with you like we used to in the days--in those days. Much I told you on that visit and more I wanted to say, but I saw that you will remain the same affectionate boy, faithful to your mother who loves you so much, and I did not want to hurt your sensibilities any longer, because I am sure that you will continue to be the same boy and remember what I have told you. I knew that and what here I am going to tell you will touch your feelings, but don’t cry, Dante, because many tears have been wasted, as your mother’s have been wasted for seven years, and never did any good.”

XVIII

The Great Novelist who makes up history had brought it about that while Sacco and Vanzetti were lying in the death-cells, there preceded them to the land of shadows a great American lord of steel and finance: Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive of the United States Steel Corporation, with resources of two billions of dollars. A great Christian he had been, helping to build that mighty university of Methodism from which Dean Wigless had assailed Felix Frankfurter; holder of eight honorary degrees from church universities--the most pious plutocrat who ever split his strikers’ skulls and set thousands of spies to cow their souls. Before he left for his mansion above, he also wrote a message to his beloved ones, giving his _vade mecum_ as a follower of the gentle Jesus. His last will and testament it was, and all the capitalist newspapers of America featured his exalted words:

“I earnestly request my wife and children and descendants that
they steadfastly decline to sign any bonds or obligations of any
kind as surety for any other person, or persons; that they refuse
to make any loans except on the basis of first-class, well-known
securities, and that they invariably decline to invest in any
untried or doubtful securities or property or enterprise or
business.”

At this same time two anarchist wops, one of them an avowed atheist, the other a vague deist of the old-fashioned sort, were writing their last words to their beloved ones, and these words also were published. Said Nicola Sacco, with one foot in eternity:

“So, Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort
your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the
discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take
her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers
here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the
harmony of the vivid stream and the gentle tranquillity of the
mother nature, and I am sure that she will enjoy this very much,
as you surely would be happy for it. But remember always, Dante,
in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only,
but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak
ones that cry for help, help the persecuted and the victim because
they are your better friends, they are the comrades that fight and
fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the
conquest of the joy and freedom for all the poor workers. In this
struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”

Also Vanzetti left his message for Dante to study in after years. One day before he died he wrote a letter to a little boy whose school friends jeered him because he was the son of a murderer. Said Bart:

“I tell you all this now, for I know well your father, he is not
a criminal, but one of the bravest men I ever knew. Some day you
will understand what I am about to tell you, that your father has
sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul
for his faith in liberty and justice for all. That day you will be
proud of your father, and if you become brave enough, you will take
his place in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and you will
vindicate his name and our blood.

“Remember and know also, Dante, that if your father and I would
have been cowards and hypocrites and renegades of our faith,
we would not have been put to death. They would not even have
convicted a leprous dog; not even executed a deadly poisonous
scorpion on such evidence as that they framed against us. They
would have given a new trial to a matricide and habitual felon on
the evidence we presented for a new trial.

“Remember, Dante, remember always these things: We are not
criminals; they convicted us on a frame-up; they denied us a new
trial; and if we will be executed after seven years, three months
and seventeen days of unspeakable tortures and wrongs, it is for
what I have already told you; because we were for the poor and
against the exploitation and oppression of man by man.”