Chapter XXII: The City of Fear (1)

I

“This is our career and our triumph,” Bart had proclaimed; and assuredly never had “a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler” caused such excitement in the world. On Saturday, two days before the execution, there was an order for a general strike in Buenos Ayres; in Berlin a protest from the trade unions, and the first radical meeting ever held in the former House of Lords of the Kingdom of Prussia; in London a mob of ten thousand in front of the American embassy; in Geneva a call for the boycotting of American goods; in Russia enormous protest meetings in every city; in Paris a hundred thousand workers parading, carrying red flags and huge placards denouncing American justice; tourists being greeted with shouts from thousands of throats, “Pardon! Pardon!”--and as a rule finding it prudent to reply, “Vive Sacco et Vanzetti!” The workers were bewildered by the spectacle of Puritan severity, and helpless in the face of it. Pierre Leon, editing a French communist paper, cabled to Joe Randall: “What can we do?” Joe’s answer was: “Repudiate the debts.” But that, alas, was not an immediate program; the best the French could do was to fail to pay them.

Only in Massachusetts itself was silence. Boston under the iron heel, and civil rights subject to revocation. One simple rule, easy for all to understand: do what the police tell you and keep your mouth shut. Superintendent Crowley had requested the mayor to cancel all the eighteen speaking permits on the Common, and thus free speech was dumped out of the “cradle of liberty.” The defense committee was trying to hire a hall for a last minute protest-meeting, but the police made a round of the halls and warned the owners; if they rented to the Reds, they would lose their license. It was a trick which “Mickey the Gunman” had been working for several years; by means of it he had suppressed a young Lithuanian named Bimba, who proclaimed himself an atheist, and annoyed the Catholic priests. The police would close up halls, on the ground that they violated fire ordinances; something which, in an old city like Boston, a great many buildings did.

At the last minute the defense committee succeeded in finding a hall, and on Saturday evening a pitiful meeting was held, with almost as many “cops” as audience. A speaker started to describe what was going to happen in Charlestown prison on Monday midnight, and a police official stepped forward, saying, “No more of that, or we’ll shut you up.” So the orators discussed the case in abstract terms, not saying anything rude about governors or college presidents, nor using bad words like “anarchistic bastards.” Paxton Hibben spoke, military and incisive; Powers Hapgood, fiery and determined; Alfred Baker Lewis, who seemed like a big but very serious boy; then Betty Alvin, for the Back Bay; and--miracle of miracles--a Catholic lifting his voice for two infidels! The members of the Boston police force rubbed their eyes as the Reverend Francis Xavier Regan took the platform, and told the story of Caleb Cunningham, the wealthy resident of Milton who had shot and killed the Swede, John Johnson, for cutting wood on his land, and had been so considerately treated by the authorities of Norfolk County. One Catholic remembered the humble origins of his Church--even in the diocese of His Eminence, “Big Bill”!

A call had been issued for labor union delegates to meet on that same Saturday evening, to consider plans for a general strike. Since it was manifestly too late, the police did not interfere. About fifty workers attended, mostly from the Italian barbers and the Jewish needle trades; the American workers present might have been counted on the fingers of one hand. The American workers were out on the roads in second-hand cars with their families, eating hot-dogs and drinking soda-pop; they were at the movies, watching poor girls marry millionaires and poor boys make fortunes overnight; they were shooting craps and playing poker and drinking home brew. Assuredly they were not out on the streets, getting their heads broken for any wops.

Michael Gold went about listening, and reporting public sentiment in Boston. A young sailor prowling in Scollay Square, on the hunt for women: “They ought to be burned; they insulted the flag.” A clerk drinking ice cream soda at a fountain: “All them Italians look like murderers to me.” A timid little groceryman expressing himself over the counter: “Yes, maybe they are innocent, but we gotta bump ’em off, or we’ll all be bombed in our beds.” A telephone girl, hearing an Italian voice complaining of a wrong number: “Aw shut up, you Guinney rat, wait till you see what we do to you on August 22nd!”

All this they had got out of their newspapers, of course. For a brief time there had been a break in newspaper solidarity regarding the Sacco-Vanzetti case; an editorial writer of the _Herald_ had won the Pulitzer prize of 1926 for an editorial demanding a new trial. But now his voice was silent. The department-stores were clamoring to have an end to the public anxiety; business had fallen off, because women, who do most of the shopping, were afraid to go about. The only industry which was thriving was that of riot and bomb insurance; the companies wrote it to the amount of eight hundred million dollars, and didn’t have to pay one cent! A net profit of a cool million to the companies, and a corresponding loss to Boston merchants. Preposterous that two wops should cause such trouble! The newspapers, which thrive upon department-store advertising, made one sweet harmony: “Stand by the Governor and the courts.” In the profession, Boston was known as “the poor-house of journalism.”

II

Cornelia, splashing around frantically for a straw to catch hold of, bethought herself of Cardinal O’Connell. Luigia Vanzetti was a faithful daughter of the church, and a pitiful figure; perhaps she might be able to tempt the great man into making an appeal for clemency. So Jessica Henderson came with her limousine, always there to help the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and they drove the anxious, fearful little woman out to the summer home of the great prelate at Marblehead. He was on the lawn with his dog when the party arrived, and Mrs. Henderson’s daughter went to ask if he would see Luigia. “Bless her heart, of course,” he said.

He was cordial, charming, as he knew how to be when it was worth while. He served tea himself, and remarked to Cornelia, “It may be a long time before you have a cardinal pouring tea for you again.” He chatted with Luigia in Italian, and Cornelia could understand enough to know that he was sympathizing greatly, and doing nothing. Afterwards he wrote and gave to the papers a statement on the subject which was a masterpiece of diplomatic piety: “Human judgment is fallible at best.... But the judgment of God is perfect and in the end He and His ways, mysterious as they are, are our hope and salvation.” Said the sarcastic Betty: “Now we know why God was invented--so that princes of the church may dodge their moral responsibilities!”

Futile to try to make headway in Boston, with the weight of such authority against you! The local liberals were hamstrung by the Lowell report. If Mr. Lowell said it, it must be so, and who are we to set ourselves up against him? Likewise Bishop Lawrence had clambered onto the bandwagon. Having asked the Governor to appoint an impartial commission, he now accepted the impartial decision, and commended the Governor for his firmness and courage. He did this in a letter, which appeared in the press.

There they stood, the three intellectual and spiritual guides of Boston: the Cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the President of Harvard University. When a stranger inquired concerning them, he was struck by a curious fact: the first statement about any one of the three would be that he was an efficient administrator of enormous properties. This was not his fault, of course; the properties were there, and must be administered; but the automatic effect was this, that if you were to go to any one of the three administrators, and make a remark suggesting that he should act upon the creed he taught, he would begin to watch you to see whether you were the dangerous kind.

The Cardinal of the Catholics was exiling rebellious spirits to the backwoods, and raising up a generation of young clerics who were at once preachers, politicians, and real estate experts; you could know when one of them was in favor by the fact that his mother and father, brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, moved immediately into expensive residences. As for the Bishop of the Blue-bloods, he had a father who helped to finance John Brown’s expedition to fight slavery in Kansas; the son was known as the best money-raiser in New England, and had turned his vast organization into a school of social propriety. When it was a question of a blue-blood church official accused of undue intimacy with choir-boys, you would see this well-bred bishop as anxious to have the law not enforced as he was to have it enforced against anarchist wops.

As for President Lowell, he would boast that every professor in his great institution enjoyed complete freedom of speech, and when some one asked him how he could manage anything so dangerous, he would smile and say that it was easy if you were careful whom you allowed to become a professor. When it chanced that a Harvard lecturer dared to attack the electric light and power interests, whose directors and bankers compose the governing body of the university, President Lowell would “fire” him, and incidentally lie to him, with exactly the same heartiness as a “wop” standing by a friend accused of banditry, or a blue-blood banker trying to save fifteen million dollars.

III

Bugles in the streets; a regiment of the state militia marching, with grim set faces--the answer of the Commonwealth to the challenge of anarchy. Airplanes flying overhead, watching for bombers in the sky. Military squads on duty at every public building, suspicious of every foreign face, and now and then stopping a passerby to search a bundle or open a suitcase. Every policeman on twenty-four hour duty again; sitting in the station-houses, and now and then called out for a wild ride or a gallop, on account of a bomb-scare. The firemen also on twenty-four hour duty, and all armed. The American Legion mobilized to guard the homes of the rich and the great. Every judge, juror, prosecutor, witness, or official who had ever had anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case was being protected, and there was no foolishness about the protection.

A man hopped out of an automobile at the home of President Lowell, and started towards the rear entrance, carrying a heavy black bag. They did not stop to ask him who he was or what he wanted, they hit him over the head and laid him out--and then ascertained that he was delivering a load of that heavy aluminum ware which is the latest fad in fancy cookery for the rich. A young Catholic priest stepped off the train in South Station, arriving from the west for a holiday; he went to the information bureau and said, “Will you please tell me the way to the State House?” “Certainly,” replied the clerk, and called a policeman, saying, “This man wants to know the way to the State House.” The kind-hearted policeman said he would escort him, and led him to a patrol-wagon, and drove him to the nearest station-house, where they held him “incommunicado” for twenty-four hours.

The great Commonwealth had told ten thousand lies; and now for every lie there was a club and a bayonet. If you wished to oppose the lies, there was just one way--put your head under the crashing clubs, throw your body onto the gleaming bayonets. This was not merely the law of Massachusetts, this was the law of life, the way by which lies have been killed throughout history. The friends of the defense confronted this crisis, and either went forward and took the punishment, or shrunk back and sneaked away with a whole skin and a damaged conscience.

Terrible scenes in the Thornwell family. In “Hillview,” Great-uncle Abner storming, because the Governor had been browbeaten once, and might yield again; Abner declared that he would wheel himself all the way to Boston, thirty miles or so on the public highway, and present himself at the Governor’s office to demand the death of the two anarchists. On the other hand, in the tenement on the north side of Beacon Hill was Deborah pleading and praying to her daughter, not to throw away her life, not to disgrace herself and her innocent and helpless family.

Cornelia was not going to get arrested; she was motoring with Mrs. Henderson to make an appeal to Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court. But Betty had pledged herself to carry a placard on the Common, and Joe also. They had sent out a call for a thousand demonstrators, and at least two were going to respond. Nothing that Deborah could say would have any effect; no tears, no prayers. “They are surely going to arrest me once,” said Betty, and laughed, a trifle hysterically. “They are not going to murder Bart and Nick without arresting me at least once!” When Deborah brought in the sacred names of little Rupert Alvin Thornwell Randall, the unnatural mother made reply: “The best thing that could happen to him would be for me and Joe to be clubbed to death, so that you and Father could raise him to be respectable!”

That was late Saturday night, after the meeting in Scenic Auditorium. Deborah stayed in town that night, and telephoned to Rupert, who gave up a service in his new private chapel, the joy of his life, to come and add the immense weight of his authority. But Betty did not even wait to see him; she went off to a gathering of the “New York nuts,” who were making cardboard signs to wear while undergoing martyrdom. Her Uncle James Scatterbridge came upon her in the lobby of the Hotel Bellevue--most fashionable of hostelries, adjoining the State House, where a group of the leisure class “nuts” had made their headquarters, to the great dismay of the management.

Uncle James came there, with blood in his eye, looking for his Josiah, intending to take him captive by force if necessary. But James’s Josiah was hiding, and when his father actually found him, he was walking on the outskirts of the Common, with a policeman holding each arm, and a jeering crowd all around. James pushed his way through and took charge, to the relief of the “cops,” who had been told to make as few arrests as possible. There followed painful hours for both father and son; but do not worry too much, for it will turn out happily in the end--the great cotton-master will be able to keep his son’s name out of the papers, and also be able to make his Josiah into a mildly successful young business man. They will look back on this adventure some day, and the older will be secretly rather proud of the younger’s nerve. “A damned fool, of course; but then, we’re all damned fools when we’re young.”

IV

Boston Common is an irregularly shaped park, comprising, with the Public Gardens, about a square mile. It is laid out with rambling paths, and has a Monument Hill, with cannon and other trophies; there are greenswards, groups of trees, a band-stand with benches, the “Frog Pond,” and in the Public Gardens a little lake for boats. The State House with the golden dome overlooks it from one corner; the Park Street Church, the Union Club, and many of the homes of the old families on Beacon Street. On the other side is Tremont Street, with the fashionable shops; and from the end of the Public Gardens starts Commonwealth Avenue, where the Alvins lived. All very fashionable, in a dignified way, mixed up with history and tradition, taking itself seriously. In the old days, this Common had been the place where the villagers pastured their cows; now it was a place for nursemaids to flirt with sailors from the ships, and for out-of-works to study the “help wanted” ads in the newspapers. On Sunday afternoons all the religious cranks, the holy rollers and the Salvation Army, shouted under the trees along the mall; also the atheists and the socialists and the single taxers, and those who refuse to believe that the earth is round.

But this Sunday, August 21st, all that was off, and for a year to come. There was a band concert and a radio concert to keep the crowds occupied; also two ball-games, and two impromptu dog-fights. Twenty-five thousand people came--having read in the papers that some new-style martyrs were going to feed themselves to the lions.

One thousand had been called for, and fourteen came. The lawyers were in part responsible for that, having strenuously urged against it. The demonstrators would be sure to get their heads clubbed, and could only do harm to the case by cheap notoriety. Those who were troubled by the former consideration were glad to have the latter for an excuse. The few stubborn ones who insisted upon coming were troubled by both considerations, but of course would only admit the latter. They brought little rolls of cardboard, printed with Sacco-Vanzetti protests, to wear over their shoulders, and made their rendezvous in a corner drug-store, eyed suspiciously by the proprietor, because they looked fidgety and queer, not at all “Boston.” The job had fallen mostly to the “New York nuts.”

There was John Dos Passos, faithful son of Harvard, and John Howard Lawson, another one of the “New Playwrights” from Greenwich Village. There was Clarina Michelson, ready to do the hard work again, and William Patterson, a Negro lawyer from New York, running the greatest risk of any of them, with his black face not to be disguised. Just up Beacon Street was the Shaw Monument, with figures in perennial bronze, of unmistakable Negro boys in uniform, led by a young Boston blue-blood on horseback; no doubt Patterson had looked at this, and drawn courage from it. To uphold the high traditions of the city, there came Betty Alvin and Joe Randall, considered a Bostonian-in-law; also James’s Josiah, more scared of his father than of the police; and Margaret Hatfield, whose father was a prominent Republican, treasurer of Middlesex county. Margaret had taken the precaution to “dress the part,” so she was safe, though she couldn’t be sure of it. Her mother was behaving exactly like Betty’s mother, wandering about the Common twisting her hands together, and moaning to herself, “Oh, _why_ do they have to do it?”

V

“Come on, you sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?” So, according to army tradition, a sergeant shouted to a squad, going “over the top” in the Argonne forest. It is an idea which, with or without the language, has animated martyrs through the ages. They have walked to the lions, they have walked to the stake and the gallows and the guillotine, and other forms of terror; now they walked to the clubs and the bayonets--a little group from the corner drug-store, quaking inside, and trembling in the knees, but setting their teeth and holding their heads high. As it happened, none was to be seriously hurt, but they could not know that; pain is pain, and a cracked skull, or the hoofs of horses in your stomach, are as unpleasant as any other form. Come on, you New York nuts, do you want to live forever?

The Common stretching before them. The mall, where the speaking should have been, is closed by a cordon of police; no use to try it there. They get out on the concrete walk, and then look at one another anxiously. Are they in a good place, among the crowd? Some one says yes, and with trembling fingers they unroll the placards and put them over their shoulders. The bystanders see, and cheers go up. Crowds begin to gather; they have been wandering about, waiting for something to happen, and here it is! “Hurrah for Sacco and Vanzetti!” “Save Sacco and Vanzetti!” At once a counter demonstration: “Down with the Reds! Lynch them!”

The little band of martyrs walk on, seeing nothing, hearing nothing; a trifle dizzy with the excitement--that rare mood of martyrdom, more wonderful than drunkenness. You walk upon the air, into the clouds; the earth and the limitations of the flesh no longer exist; you have transcended them all, you belong to the ages, you speak to God. “Wir sind all des Todes eigen,” sings the German poet--“we all belong to death.” We have seen such wickedness upon earth that we choose rather to die than to let it prevail.

“All right,” says the world, “if you want to die, we are willing!” The lions roar; if you want to be eaten, their stomachs are made for the purpose! Here come the police, clubs drawn. “Enough of that now! Take off those signs and get out of here!” They try to grab the signs, and the marchers dodge this way and that, to protect them as long as possible; bystanders grab at the signs, others try to block the way of the “cops.” The clubs begin to fall; a disagreeable sound, the thud of hickory on human flesh and bone.

Here come the mounted men, riding through the throngs. “Look out for yourself!” Women shriek; the horses charge straight ahead, knocking people down. A strange experience for a daughter of the best families--Betty can hardly believe it; she thinks the horse will swerve at the last moment; then she realizes that the rider means to run her down, and she leaps too late, the shoulder of the passing horse strikes her and sends her spinning.

The trooper speeds on; he has spied the black face, and wants that most of all. The Negro runs, and the rider rears the front feet of his steed, intending to strike him down with the iron-shod hoofs. But fortunately there is a tree, and the Negro leaps behind it; a man can run round a tree faster than the best-trained police-mount--the dapper and genial William Patterson proves it by making five complete circuits before he runs into the arms of an ordinary cop, who grabs him by the collar and tears off his sign and tramples it in the dirt, and then starts to march him away. “Well,” he remarks, sociably, “this is the first time I ever see a nigger bastard that was a communist.” The lawyer is surprised, because he has been given to understand that that particular bad word is barred from the Common; Mike Crowley was so shocked, two weeks ago, when Mary Donovan tacked up a sign to a tree: “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” But apparently the police do not have to obey their own laws.

The “Black Maria” is in readiness, and comes with clanging bell, and the prisoners are loaded into it--all but the “nigger bastard.” He has to be walked to the police-station--because it would not be decent for him to ride in the same patrol-wagon with his friend Clarina Michelson! The others are driven off--and when they get to the La Grange Street station-house and compare notes, they discover that they have lost their blue-bloods! Betty is missing, and her husband, and her cousin Josiah! Margaret Hatfield is missing! Even in the midst of that excitement, the police have found time to consult the “social register”! A little later they turn loose John Dos Passos--no Harvard graduates wanted! The only ones they arrest are five workers, two named Sansevrion, one Schulman, one Amari, and that Cosimo Carvotta against whom they have a special grudge, on account of having lied about him in the police court after the previous Sunday’s arrests.

VI

In the La Grange Street station they found Paula Holladay, waiting for some company. No story of that last Sunday would be complete without the Odyssey of Paula, who had made a parade all by herself--and a long one! She was the founder of “Polly’s,” a Greenwich Village café renowned in song and story; that summer she had been running a restaurant in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. Her conscience began to gnaw at her, and she decided to do what one woman could to express a sense of injustice. She turned her business over to a friend, and put on a sign reading, “Is justice dead? Save Sacco and Vanzetti,” and set out to walk from Provincetown to Boston, a distance, as the “nut” walks, of a hundred and twenty-five miles.

Now and then on the route, women working in their gardens would see that sign, and follow along on the other side of the picket-fence, saying, “I wish I had a shot-gun in the house, I’d show you what I’d do to you!” Ladies in automobiles would stop to express the same sentiment. But apparently the shotgun is an obsolete instrument in Massachusetts, for Paula reached Boston with a whole skin, except for a blister on the heel. She joined the other nuts, and learning that the police were destroying all banners and signs, she painted her message on a red “slicker,” or waterproof coat, and sallied forth onto the Common thus garbed.

She was passing the bandstand, when the first “cop” spied her, and took her in tow. A crowd gathered quickly, and there were waves of shouting, some for, some against. The policeman’s hand began to tremble on the woman’s arm. “Why are you so nervous?” she said--after which he managed to control himself. Another came to his aid, and then two mounted men, who kept her between them, safe. When she told them that she was determined to stay on the Common, they conducted her to the police-station. “What is the charge?” she demanded; the answer was, “Oh, never mind that, just lock her up.”

Presently came “Mike” Crowley, having kissed the Blarney stone that morning. “Now it would be too bad for a nice-looking young lady like you to get into any trouble that might get her on the books here.” The answer of Paula was, “I am neither so young nor so good-looking, and I am not afraid to get on the books. I want to know whether I am kept here by force without any charge.” When he wouldn’t answer, she said, “I will find out,” and started to leave; so then he put his hand upon her shoulder, and she was there by force. They kept her until evening, when there were no more crowds upon the Common, and no more harm to be done by the wearing of a red “slicker” with the question, “Is justice dead?”

VII

The lawyers were making another attempt to open the Department of Justice files, and they appealed to Governor Fuller for a respite until the documents could be studied. Arthur Hill asked also for time to permit the United States Supreme Court to consider his application. The Governor followed his usual policy of declining to say what he would do; so the lawyers were racing about from one country-place to another, trying to persuade some judge to order a stay. In those last hectic days they put the matter before a dozen different judges, representing the Superior Court and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and the District Courts and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mr. Hill journeyed to see Justice Holmes at his place in Beverly, on the North Shore: Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the poet, eighty-six years of age, respected by all liberals, because he and Brandeis invariably wrote a minority opinion when the court made further restrictions upon human rights in the interest of privilege. The old gentleman now said that he did not think he had the power to interfere, but wished them luck with some other justice who might think differently. “Unofficially,” he said that Sacco and Vanzetti could not have got a fair trial in 1921.

They went to Louis Brandeis, their last hope. A Jewish lawyer of great ability, Brandeis had begun practice in Boston, and made a fortune early, and then turned against the system, and became an advocate of the public interest, and therefore one of the most hated men in the city. When Woodrow Wilson had named him for the Supreme Court bench, there had been a howl from State Street, and no voice louder than that of President Lowell of Harvard. Nevertheless, the radical Jew had got in; and now he had the greatest chance of his career--and missed it.

The Court was composed mainly of hard-boiled corporation lawyers, selected by President Taft--now the Chief Justice--and by Harding and Coolidge. Undoubtedly these men would have reversed any action that Brandeis might have taken; but at least it would have been a gesture, and a crown upon a great life. Cornelia spent Sunday afternoon arguing and pleading with the justice, but in vain; telegrams came raining upon him, in vain. He was bound, like all other judges. It so happened that Rosina Sacco had occupied a house belonging to Mrs. Brandeis in Dedham, and this constituted “prejudice.” The justice could not be persuaded that prejudice in favor of mercy was different from prejudice in favor of one interest against another. Vanzetti commented upon this singular situation in a letter to Harry Dana--almost the last words he wrote:

“So it is coming to pass that some justices repel our appeal
because they are friendly with us, and other justices repel our
appeal because they are hostile to us, and through this elegant
_Forche Caudine_ we are led straight to the electric chair.”

These nine elderly gentlemen who did the real governing of the United States were overworked, and in dread of taking more upon their bowed shoulders. They had the task of telling the American people what laws they might pass and what laws they might not pass; what their laws meant, or ought to mean; in short, what served the propertied classes, and what threatened them. An enormous task; and the old gentlemen contemplated with dismay the idea of opening the sluice-gates and letting in more work upon themselves.

They dealt with the law, they said, and never with the facts. But when there came an emergency where it seemed necessary to deal with facts, they would find a way to do it. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had just shown that in the Jerry Walker case, where the jury had decided the facts against the interest of the fellow club-members of the Court. The Court had stepped in and considered such facts as they pleased, and like all special pleaders they had stated the facts on their own side, and suppressed the facts on the other side. But in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti there were no vast sums of money at stake--only the lives of two wops. “It were better that you be ruined than that the law be changed for the likes of you!”

VIII

Cornelia came back to her apartment on Sunday evening, beaten and exhausted. Betty was over at defense headquarters, helping to organize the new arrivals and plan the last demonstration. Poets, writers, artists--all persons, old and young, with an urge to martyrdom--were pouring into Boston, and in front of the State House they would have their chance. Betty was lame from her effort to upset a horse, but was sticking to her desk; she had not been to bed the night before, and was not going to-night. “Plenty of time to sleep after Monday midnight,” she said. “Bart and Nick will keep us company.”

Joe was at the headquarters of the new “Citizens’ National Committee,” which was concentrating its efforts upon trying to persuade the Federal authorities to accept their responsibility in the case. The committee was sending and receiving hundreds of telegrams every day: obtaining signatures to a petition to the President of the United States, asking him to intervene, according to the precedent set by Woodrow Wilson, when the State of California had been on the point of executing Tom Mooney. But there was an important difference between the two cases; Mooney was an A. F. of L. man, and labor had to be handled gingerly in war-time. But now there was what capitalism calls “peace,” and Sacco and Vanzetti had no standing in the court of power-politics.

The President of the United States was that “Cautious Cal,” whom we saw shot up on the Massachusetts escalator. “Keep cool with Coolidge,” had been the slogan which had got him the greatest vote ever given to a wizard of prosperity. Now the wizard was keeping himself cool upon a high mountain peak in Yellowstone Park. He knew the way to do nothing, and do it more systematically, than any man who had ever held the office. He had as much idea of dipping his fingers into that boiling Boston caldron as he had of spending his vacation in the mountains of the moon. Hundreds of dollars were spent collecting signatures to a petition, and thousands were spent by individuals telegraphing direct. The messages came by the basketful, and served to start the evening fires for a chilly and frugal New Englander.

Musmanno was at Hill’s office, trying for a long-distance telephone connection with Chief Justice Taft. This elder statesman was in Canada, where he could not legally sign a writ; it was Musmanno’s idea that he might come to the border, and there at least hear a petition. The young lawyer had an airplane ready, and would start that Sunday night. He sat at the telephone from seven in the evening until four the next morning, but the great jurist was able to find some perfectly good legal reason for staying where he was.

IX

Deborah was in the apartment, waiting for her mother, to plead with her not to kill herself in this dreadful crisis. Cornelia was hardly able to get up the stairs without help; yet unwilling to go to the Alvin home, where there was an elevator. She could not sleep; she must lie on the bed, with the telephone receiver to her lips, asking for news. She would sink back, and Deborah would think she was resting--but no, she was getting ready to call Mr. Moors, to see if he could not induce Mr. Lowell to induce the Governor to grant a few more days! She was appealing to Hubert Herring, a young Congregational clergyman who had risked his job, getting a dozen other clergymen to sign an appeal to the Governor!

Mother and daughter shouted to each other across an abyss, and just now the abyss was full of thunder, and it was hard for voices to get across. “Mother! Mother!”--Cornelia heard a faint cry--“You think more about two Italian anarchists than you do about any member of your own family!”

“My dear”--Cornelia shouting back--“no one is planning to murder any member of my family.”

Deborah would take a sentence and meditate over it, until an answer became so urgent in her bosom that she would try once more. “Mother, there are other kinds of unhappiness, almost as bad as being murdered.”

“My child, that is God, trying to break the hard shell of your pride.”

Cornelia phoned to Arthur Hill’s office. His daughter-in-law was in charge of the phone, and would tell her if there was any more news. There was none, and Cornelia hung up, and sat staring before her with a face of torment. Deborah’s heart ached, but the only way she could help was to diminish her mother’s interest in those dreadful Italians! “Mother, Henry has become positive that both those men were dynamiters.” And again: “Mother, I believe you really prefer dynamiters to law-abiding people!”

Make allowances for Cornelia. These family disputes, that go on for years and years and never get anywhere, are hard upon the nerves. Said the mother: “I prefer the dynamiter who cares about justice to the most law-abiding person in the world who doesn’t!”

The telephone rang; Deborah’s older daughter, Priscilla, asking if she might come round. This had been one of Deborah’s schemes--her daughter would keep Cornelia’s mind occupied with news about the great-grandchildren. But Priscilla had better not mention that her mother had suggested the visit. Deborah was forever devising such little plots--always, of course, for the other person’s good; and she had trained her older daughter to coöperate.

Cornelia began asking about the wife of Governor Fuller--what sort of woman was she? It seemed that Jessica Henderson and Cornelia were planning to motor up to Rye Beach, New Hampshire, the next day, and implore the help of this much-troubled lady. Deborah told what she had been able to judge from one dinner-party. Mrs. Fuller was a Catholic; and Cornelia asked, what would that mean? Could she possibly be made to understand that Jesus was to be electrocuted in Boston to-morrow midnight?

So Deborah burst out again: “Mother, do you think Jesus ever used dynamite?”

“No, my dear, it wasn’t invented in those days. All he had was a whip, to drive the moneychangers out of Trinity Church.” And after Deborah had expatiated upon the extreme charitableness of Trinity Church, her mother shocked her by exclaiming: “Oh, Boston, Boston, thou that givest the prophets a ride in the patrol-wagon!”

X

Priscilla came, a tall and distinguished young matron now; but she did not get any chance to tell the news about her three children. She found the poor old woman lying back on her pillow with her eyes closed, speaking in whispers which might have come from a death-bed. She took Priscilla’s hand, and said, “I talk to your mother, and it means nothing to her. Let me try the next generation!”

“Yes, Grandmother,” said Priscilla, obediently. “What is it?”

“Your mother cannot understand how anarchists come to be in Boston. So I try to explain to her. When I was a young married woman, about your age, I used to look out of our back windows and see pitiful children of the poor, going about in winter-time with ragged shawls over their shoulders and holes in their shoes, rooting in the frozen garbage in alleys behind the Back Bay homes. I was told that it was the will of God, so I did nothing. But now I have discovered that it is a social system. All those miles of slum tenements down in the South End, falling into ruins, with filth and litter in the alleys and mangy cats prowling--that hideousness which is the underside of our proud and pious city--that is not God, that is blue-blood old ladies and gentlemen holding acres and acres of land, inherited from their great-grandfathers, and letting the tenements fall into ruins while they wait for an increase in land values which they do nothing to produce. Is that so hard to understand, Priscilla?”

“No, Grandmother.”

“Well, that is one detail out of a hundred. Your husband owns millions, because he was allowed to inherit a mountain of copper, which he did nothing to earn, and which others manage and work for him. You will inherit millions because your father is allowed to manufacture the credit of the country and keep it for his own use--no, Deborah, don’t argue with me, for I know you haven’t studied our banking system, even though you are a banker’s wife. Mr. Lowell is a multi-millionaire because he is allowed to exploit the labor of thousands of slaves in cotton-mills--even though he never tended a spindle or managed a factory in his life. Governor Fuller is the richest of all of us, because he is allowed to sit like a robber baron of the Middle Ages, and fine everybody a thousand dollars for the privilege of driving a Packard car in New England. He talks about bandits, and really thinks they should all be executed! All of us sit on top of our privileges, and haven’t the least idea of getting off; we use all the powers of society to seduce or destroy those who resist us--if necessary, we kill them for a crime, whether they committed it or not.”

There were many questions that Priscilla would have liked to ask, and many objections that her mother would have liked to register. But both of them were frightened, thinking that Cornelia might gasp out her life on that bed. So they sat silent, with distress in their eyes; and presently the poor soul was whispering again:

“My children, I have followed this case for seven years, and here is what I know about it, a frightful thing to say--from first to last there has not been one honest man who had anything to do with it on the government side: not a single one, from the policemen who lied on the witness-stand to your three blue-blood commissioners who doctored the record--every man has been seeking a pretext to carry out his will upon two fanatics whom he considers dangerous. That is the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case; and there lie those two men in the death-house, one of them a self-taught philosopher, a man of genius who has managed under the pressure of affliction to make himself into the most beautiful character I have ever known in my years on this earth--”

There came tears from the wrinkled old eyelids. “Sacco, too!” she exclaimed. “A man with the heart of a child!” She put out her hand and took some papers from the lamp-stand by her bed, and began turning them over. “Listen; he is writing to Inez, his six-year-old daughter; a letter which the child may have in after years, to tell her what her father was like:

“‘It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer time to be sitting with you in the home nest under an oak tree shade, beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying, and singing through the little verdant fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another and from the clear vivid stream to your mother’s embrace. The same I have wished and loved to see for other poor girls and their brothers, happy with their mother and father, as I dreamed for us. But it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes has saddened very badly your father’s soul. The men of this dying old society brutally have pulled me away from the embrace of your brother and your poor mother. But in spite of all, the free spirit of your father’s faith survives.’”

XI

On Monday morning, the last day, Governor Fuller came to his office in the State House at half past ten o’clock; rosy and smiling, greeting the newspapermen: “Good morning, boys; a fine day. I’ll be here at my desk until midnight, boys, doing my duty.” Already there were deputations waiting for him, lawyers from New York, editors, writers, labor leaders, society women--he would see them all, in batches, all day long; he would greet them with his marble smile, listen with politeness, and say: “I will take what you have said under consideration.”

Some came to urge him on the other side; including the newly elected officers of the American Legion, which was holding a convention in the State House that morning. Returned soldiers who hadn’t had enough of war, they were keen for this as for all other killings. They were singing the “Star-spangled Banner” at noon, when the first group of pickets began their march on the street outside.

All day long the pickets would come, one batch after another, ten or twenty at a time, with their placards of polite protest, all bad words barred. They would walk their appointed number of paces, and then the police would close about them, and take them in tow, and march them to Joy Street, and then--“Files right!”--to the police-station. The men were packed, eight into a cell, and the women in the guard-room, waiting for their bail.

There were well-known names among them. Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Rockland, Maine, home of her ancestors for many generations. Loveliest of women poets, she would find this a devastating experience; life would not seem the same after a rendezvous with murder. “My personal physical freedom, my power to go in and out when I choose, my personal life even, is no longer quite so important to me as it once was.... The physical world, and that once was all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer make up to me for all the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.”

John Dos Passos again, and John Howard Lawson; also Clarina Michelson, and Paula Holladay--still with her red slicker. And Paxton Hibben--still with his speech. Alfred Baker Lewis of the Socialist Party, Harry Canter for the communists, and Margaret Hatfield, who might be taken as representing the Republicans, since her father was county treasurer. Professor Ellen Hayes of Wellesley College, seventy-six years of age, marching with a cane, and holding her head up high--the most serious hour of a scholar’s life! A picturesque figure she made, in a Norfolk jacket and skirt, square-toed shoes, a little flat hat, and white hair bobbed to her shoulders; bright, eager eyes and sensitive face, now grim--the New England conscience working. “What is your occupation?” asked the clerk. “Professor of astronomy and applied mathematics.” They did not book these very often!

Others to uphold the honor of “Old Boston”: Catharine Huntington, who lived on Pinckney Street, with ancestry going back three hundred years in New England; Helen Peabody, and Helen Todd, suffrage workers; Lola Ridge, the poet--all these New England born, with forefathers on the _Mayflower_, or the _Fortune_, the second-best boat. This was true of Edna Millay, of Margaret Hatfield and of Dos Passos. The committee had sent out a call for everybody “with a background”--the polite Boston phrase. Nothing would count so much with the newspapers; the humble Jews and Italians and Slavs--Frishman and Pogrebisky, Chiplovitz and Chasanovitz, Pulcini and Magliocca and Spognodi--these must be content to have their names listed wrong. “What is fame?” say the British army officers. “To die in battle, and have your name misspelled in the _Gazette_.”

Betty and Joe had their chance now; the police were taking them as they came, blue-bloods and all; so near the end, they no longer worried about public opinion; it would all be over to-night, things would settle down, the dead wops would stay dead. Over in the office of the Boston _Herald_, on Tremont Street, they were putting into type an editorial, kissing the case good-by. A year ago they had been heroically demanding justice, and winning a prize for it; now what they wanted was “Normalcy.” “Back to Normalcy! The asperities which have attended the Sacco-Vanzetti case in its long and tedious journey through the courts are greatly to be regretted, and should be forgotten as quickly as possible. Let us get back to business and the ordinary concerns of life, in the confident belief that the agencies of law have performed their duties with fairness as well as justice.... The chapter is closed. The die is cast. The arrow has flown. The voice of the department store advertising agent has been heard in the office of the _Herald_.”--They did not publish that last sentence, of course. That was the truth.

XII

Betty and Joe marshaled all the others, and then joined the last contingent, a group of needle-trade workers, risking their jobs to go to jail. The little party came into Beacon Street, and saw a mob of thousands on the side adjoining the Common. The great iron gates in front of the State House were closed and chained. The policemen were an army, the reporters and photographers and plainclothesmen were another. The pickets were accused of obstructing the sidewalk, but really it was these others who did it.

The little group exposed their signs and began to walk. The cops closed round them, not much formality or delay; the guardians of order were tired, and the seven-minute provision got scant attention. The pickets were told to disperse, and when they walked on, paying no attention, they were shoved against the railing and closed in. “Christ, my arm!” screamed a Jewish boy, not yet out of his teens.

“What are you doing?” cried Betty, to the policeman. “You don’t have to twist his arm like that!”

“Shut up, you bitch!” was the answer.

“I don’t have to! I’ll take your number, and make it hot for you, if you don’t let up on that boy!”

“Shut your trap, and go back where you came from!”

“I came from Commonwealth Avenue, and my father is Rupert Alvin, president of the Pilgrim National Bank of Boston.”

“Holy Jesus!” said the pious cop, and stopped his torture.

The reporters came running; a story for the last afternoon editions. “Have you anything to say, Miss Alvin?”

“Yes, I have a whole speech to make, but your papers won’t print it.”

“Give us a try!”

“Well, I’ll say that the men we are murdering to-night will have a statue in front of the State House before you and I die. I’ll say there are two judges whose names will be linked together in history--Pontius Pilate and Webster Thayer.” Thus Betty, trembling with rage, the white and pink in her lovely cheeks coming and going like Northern lights in the sky.

“Come on, Miss,” said the scared cop; and Betty walked down the street, remarking, “My husband is back there--Joe Randall; he’s got a statement written out.”

So the reporters went to Joe, who gave them a copy of a cablegram he had sent that day, in answer to one from Pierre Leon in Paris: “Tell the workers of the world that the way to punish Boston for this crime is to repudiate the debts. Cancel every dollar owed to America, both publicly and privately. When the first nation does that, Boston will be sorry it committed murder. When the second nation does it, Boston will take steps to bring Sacco and Vanzetti back to life.” Needless to say, that did not appear in any Boston newspaper!

The old Joy Street police station, so oddly named. The main room crowded with tired and disgusted-looking policemen, and young ladies from sheltered homes, getting their first lessons in profanity. “Take these god-dam bastards to number nine.” “Take them bitches to the detention room.” “What the hell we going to do with this new bunch?” There were more than a hundred and fifty in all, and the old place had been built before the program of “loitering for liberty” had been thought of. The walls shook with cheering, and waves of revolutionary song:

_Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!_

Outside in the crowd there were Reds who joined in. Boston was honeycombed with sedition, so the patriotic societies declared.

The women sat on the benches lined against the wall. They spread newspapers, for the place was in a state of filth not to be described in print; the walls against which you wanted to lean were covered with dark smears, the blood of that creature which Vanzetti termed the “bed-buck.” If a woman asked for a toilet, she was taken to a place of filth in an open cell among the men. If she asked for a drink, she was pointed to a faucet with a dipper so dirty that she would not take it in her hand. If she complained, the word would be, “Why don’t you go back to Rooshia?” When your time came to be bailed out, you put up two dollars extra for the bailer; graft in Boston had become a system, a vested right. You could even have got a drink of the best liquor, confiscated from the unlicensed bootleggers, if you had looked like the right sort, and had the price. But you could not get the windows of this hellhole opened--not unless everybody would agree to stop singing Bolshevik songs.

XIII

Mary Donovan came, with bail for Powers Hapgood. He was to be her husband before long, and she had reason to be concerned about him now, for he had won special enmity. This was his fourth arrest. After the Sunday demonstration, a fortnight ago, the police had come with a warrant and arrested him again upon the more serious charge of “inciting to riot.” “A bare-headed youth leading women into danger,” said the police sergeant in court, and the judge said, “Six months.”