Chapter II: The Beginning

“You cannot kill the dream of those who find
A faith that shall restore the world to men.”
+Lucia Trent.+[2]

Past flashed the crowned roads of Vermont, then New Hampshire and finally Massachusetts: ponds, lakes, mountains, little villages, larch and hemlock, spruce and birch, fireweed, and mullein in bloom, goldenrod and button bush, brook and bridge, and the old, old farmhouses of a day gone by,--all the beauty and comfort and wealth that lie between the Adirondack region where John Brown is buried yet still lives, into the outskirts of Boston where some seventy-five years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived and wrote those famous essays which still form part of the reading of all thoughtful men and women.

The land of “promise” for so many over so many scores of years! Beside the road into an old Vermont farmhouse with a lean-to roof stood a woman, shawl about her shoulders, gazing off into the trees and up to the hills. How many generations had it been since for her people, too, America had been the land of “promise”? The drape of shawl and angle of the unmistakable New England back said that it had been a long, long time.

Then we were pulling into a “marble” city where a young married couple took the chairs opposite mine. As the wife was seating herself she saw a package which had been dropped hastily into her chair by the porter as he went forward.

“What’s that,--a bomb?” said the wife, looking at it with suspicion.

“Yes,” answered her husband, facetiously, “a Sacco-Vanzetti bomb.”

Derided, and so reassured, the wife sat down and the husband opened his Sunday paper.

“Justice Holmes won’t act,” said the husband.

“What’ll they do now?” asked the wife.

“Get somebody else,” answered the husband, a young Uncle Sam, lean and muscular and plain.

Comfort everywhere and abundance! Then the smell of the sea at night, somehow curiously discordant with its suggestion of vast fresh spaces of dark water and sky as we drew into the electric-lighted yet dingy north end of Boston. I was on my way back to be with the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee as the night of respite or death approached.

“There is Judge Brandeis,” ran my thought as I walked swiftly down the North Station platform; “he is really the hope.”

Stepping through the door to take a taxi over to Hanover Street, in that semi-circle of electric lights, men were shouting and waving a small pink “extra” at the top of which stood two words in big headlines: “BRANDEIS WON’T--”

After that nothing was “visible” except the panorama of thought that passed, a vague sense of going through the “gray” of Scollay Square, and the knowledge that the taxi had turned around at the end of one of the cross streets and that we were in front of “256” and the steep stairs, two flights up, to the offices.

Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan were not there. But Joseph Moro was,--always there, always busy.

It was his voice asking, “Have you met Miss Vanzetti?”

The memory of another voice was in my ears, that of a woman of letters who has worked and lived in Italy more or less for thirty years and whose books on Italy are familiar friends to many who love that land.

Again that literary friend was saying, “I understand that the Signorina Vanzetti has behaved herself like a heroine and a lady from beginning to end of her stay in Boston.”

But the “end” was not yet. Beside Miss Vanzetti sat Rosa Sacco. From the glow on those sensitive faces it looked even as if a happier end might be in sight. And then it occurred to me that both had just come from the Scenic Auditorium meeting where they had been given so kind a greeting from the loyal thousand gathered there. Friendship in such an hour casts no common light. Perhaps it was the reflection of that welcome which was still upon their faces.

And the night passed, even as those winding, hill-cupped roads of Vermont and New Hampshire had passed. Only the panorama of dreaming and waking was not of pond and lake, of mountain, of village and of tree, of flower, rock, bridge, and ancient house.

The panorama was of brave men and women who, in the seven years’ struggle they had made for justice for these two workers who had been dreaming of and working for a world without war and poverty, had shown the principle of selflessness; those two noble prisoners back in the Death House again, already from their hands the touch and scent of strong leather, the silvery coolness of fish and the smell of the sea gone forever; the Defense Committee and its counsel, without hope, fighting on to the end; the friends who for justice’s sake--doctors, lawyers, merchants, pastors (but no priests)--rallied about them, giving beyond their means, working beyond their strength; and these two loving women before me who spoke precisely and with quiet.

And somehow in those passing human pictures were all the strength, intention, beauty of life itself, crowning dream and waking with more wonder than hill the valley,--that valley of the shadow of death,--a symbol towards which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were on their way.

Defeat? Yes, of a kind, there at the Bellevue Headquarters where the Citizens’ National Committee, an eleventh hour organization, was sponsored by men and women of acknowledged power, already a list of 505 names, many of which are known for public service throughout whatever parts of the earth are still socially-minded: Jane Addams, Judge Amidon of North Dakota, Mary Austin, Howard Brubaker, J. McKeen Cattell, John S. Codman, John R. Commons, Waldo Cook, John Dewey, Dr. Haven Emerson, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Walcott Farnam, Mrs. J. Malcolm Forbes, Norman Hapgood, Arthur Garfield Hays, William Ernest Hocking, John Howard Lawson, Mary E. McDowell, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Mussey, George E. Roewer Jr., Graham Taylor, John T. Vance, Oswald Garrison Villard, Marian Parker Whitney, Mary E. Woolley, and some five hundred other names representing conspicuous achievement.[3]

Nevertheless it was a Committee which in the very process of organizing suffered from disorganization, attacked from all sides by the consciousness of the mythology of fear which the philosophy and economics of a century had built up and a World War consummated. Now as swiftly and inexorably as cancer strikes the human body,--money-symbolism, greed, class-consciousness, class-hatred, covering themselves with the garments of respectability, law, and patriotism, had struck into the social body. A strong Committee, despite its strength aware of its helplessness, consisting among others of Dr. Alice Hamilton of Harvard, Paul Kellogg of the _Survey_, Amy Woods, Waldo Cook of the _Springfield Republican_ and John F. Moors, was formed to represent the Citizens’ National Committee. Mr. Moors is a Harvard Overseer as well as a banker. It was he who persuaded President Lowell to serve on the Advisory Committee. When the decision of the Committee was brought in, he was willing to accept it but joined the Citizens’ National Committee to ask for clemency only. At noon this delegation called upon the Governor. The Governor’s Secretary Mr. MacDonald, who had handled all the material submitted to the Governor and dealt with all the witnesses, derailed the purpose of the Committee by greeting Waldo Cook with the accusation that Mr. Cook had accepted a bribe of $20,000 from the Defense Committee to write his Sacco and Vanzetti editorials for the _Springfield Republican_.

And defeat at Defense Headquarters, too? Yes, of a sort--the kind whose terms have in them ideas which find symbolic immortality equally upon the Cross or in the Death House.

That noon Felix Frankfurter said in the dingy corridor of Defense Headquarters, out of the hearing of Rosa Sacco, “She must not be made conscious of the larger issues of this thing, for now how can she think of anything but that it is her loved one who suffers! Yet somehow, no matter what happens to-night, I am too healthy--or something--to give up hope. I cannot believe it is the end.”

And the spent figure of Aldino Felicani, bending to Destiny but not broken.

And the arrow-flight of Arthur Hill’s car rushing now southward towards the sea to ask legal intervention from one, a judge of the Supreme Court, who, showing neither hospitality nor the quality of mercy, that early morning missed the great opportunity of his career. Then another flight northward, desperate, the last chance, in an open boat upon the sea, to an island whose shoreline is a rocky temple of beauty upon which the Defense was to meet its last shipwreck.

The day was passing. With it the hours of the two who were to be executed were spilling swiftly from one glass to another, from life to death. A curious sense of whirling figures grew upon one and of futility. It was not unlike dust in sunlight. In the offices telephones rang incessantly, telegraph messengers came and went, men and women moved swiftly to and fro, typewriters clicked.... And in those offices at the Bellevue, as well as at the Defense Headquarters, national, as well as international contacts by telegraph and cable were bravely maintained to the last.

A few figures stood out as somehow expressive, in their very difference, of this united struggle of conscience against injustice: John Dos Passos flitting about, cheerful, charming; Mrs. Elliott here, as in her work for peace, fearless, gentle, quiet; Paul Kellogg frayed with years of battle for social welfare, pale, determined; Dr. Alice Hamilton of Harvard, strong in reserve; Waldo Cook, cool-headed, responsible, ready at any cost, but never by any means except by the use of reason to maintain the editorial position of the _Springfield Republican_. Mrs. Glendower Evans, in gray, white-haired, was seated, a Quaker-like figure in the midst of the Woman’s City Club, waiting, talking with the friends who came to her. Mrs. Evans’s faithful friendship to Sacco and Vanzetti, and therefore to the issues of justice, had proved itself in more than one way. Not only had she given the case her financial support but also she had assembled evidence with, as a friend wrote of her, “an insight as to its value in court which was worthy of a mind long-trained by court practice.” Best of all was the gift of herself, so complete that she was troubled not to have been able to share even imprisonment.

And there was Powers Hapgood testing the free assemblage and free speech issue again and yet again, thinking, as Paul Kellogg wrote of him in the _Survey_, “If, when the lives of two men were at stake and thousands of working people believed they weren’t getting justice at the hands of the courts, you couldn’t even get a permit to discuss the issue on Boston Common, then it looked as if we had let our old liberties be scrapped for us and political action didn’t offer a way out. And they would be scrapped, if we didn’t exercise our rights and show that men believed in them.”

Assuredly in those thirteen days in Boston from the tenth of August to the twenty-second, when the issue of justice hung in the balance, with those in power there was no spirit of making good a mistake either by experience or by free discussion. Boston Regnant through Chief of Police Crowley denied all requests for use of the Common. And even upon that night of the twenty-second Crowley was to refuse Miss Hale’s request for the use of Bunker Hill Monument as a place for free assemblage, “where the people might repeat the Lord’s Prayer or sing hymns.” It is not improbable that many sorts and conditions of Americans who, for conscience’ sake, assembled in Boston during those days, wondered in what traditions of free speech and free assemblage the police representation of those in power had been trained. It is certain that the social and political education of those who controlled the police had included the name of John Stuart Mill and possibly even a certain paragraph from that most famous of his essays +ON LIBERTY+: “+BUT THE PECULIAR EVIL OF SILENCING THE EXPRESSION OF AN OPINION IS, THAT IT IS ROBBING THE HUMAN RACE; POSTERITY AS WELL AS THE EXISTING GENERATION; THOSE WHO DISSENT FROM THE OPINION, STILL MORE THAN THOSE WHO HOLD IT. IF THE OPINION IS RIGHT, THEY ARE DEPRIVED OF THE OPPORTUNITY OF EXCHANGING ERROR FOR TRUTH; IF WRONG, THEY LOSE, WHAT IS ALMOST AS GREAT A BENEFIT, THE CLEARER PERCEPTION AND LIVELIER IMPRESSION OF TRUTH, PRODUCED BY ITS COLLISION WITH ERROR.... WE CAN NEVER BE SURE THAT THE OPINION WE ARE ENDEAVORING TO STIFLE IS A FALSE OPINION; AND IF WE WERE SURE, STIFLING IT WOULD BE AN EVIL STILL.+”

Throughout the day it seemed clearer and clearer, where much was confused, that already as individuals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were being lost sight of, that already they were gone from our midst--though they had still a few hours to live--and had become symbolic of issues more important than the life of any human being can ever be.

And then another figure in the midst of many: Alfred Baker Lewis, himself just out of the police station, coming swiftly through the hotel lobby.

Catching sight of me, he called, “A lot of them have been arrested and we haven’t any money left to bail them. Have you any?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I’ll take over what I have and get more. Where shall I go?”

“They’re in the Joy Street Police Station. Mary Donovan’s there.” And he was gone.

So was I in a quick shift from the Bellevue to the lock-up and the greeting with Mary Donovan standing by her “people” in and out of jail.

In the flight to and fro in which, through Amy Woods, John Dos Passos, Mrs. Glendower Evans, Arthur Garfield Hays, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and some other generous friends, more than enough money was collected to bail out a group of over one hundred and fifty men and women, certain fragments of pictures stood out: a young man, stunted in growth, with pure childlike face, being hustled down Joy Street between two officers twice his size;[4] Professor Ellen Hayes of Wellesley being taken to the patrol wagon on the arm of a young Irish bluecoat--untroubled, serene, “a grand soul” as Mary Donovan said of her later that day; some groups of garment workers cheering their comrades at the risk of being themselves arrested; Edna St. Vincent Millay seated in the bail room, her grave, dark husband, Eugene Boissevin, standing beside her; Clarina Michelson, with energy undiminished by the Passaic strike, cheerful, kindly, being bailed; Lola Ridge coming out of the inner guard room, her face solemn in the solemn hours that were passing.

Nevertheless that jail will remain in my memory as the only gay place which I saw in those thirteen days.

From one nice-looking group being herded in, a voice called blithely, “Here come some more of these jail birds!”

They looked it, America’s youth, best and bravest! And within that station were being deposited the many placards which many had been carrying, among them one which had in it the meaning of all the others,--Paula Halliday’s SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI! IS JUSTICE DEAD?

Here were none of those who, to quote a line from Laura Simmons’s sonnet, kept their “prudent way within the crowd.” While I waited in the bailing room where, in addition to the bail asked, the bailer collected two dollars for each arrest--his way of earning a living!--a man, pointing to a suit case, asked me to sit down. It was kindness, and in such a place well to cultivate kindness.

For awhile all the windows were shut tight. Within a space adequate for two score there were packed over several hours almost seven times that number. The windows were closed, for some fifty garment workers were chanting the Internationale, their triumphant, militant song of brotherhood.

From the guard room Clarina Michelson, Helen Todd, Lola Ridge, and others were being let out. Mary Donovan seemed anxious about some who should be bailed at once, among them Powers Hapgood. She turned to look for him, but, strangely, he was gone. And with him the day was going, too.

The last night had come. At Defense Headquarters, Louis Bernheimer was sending and receiving messages. He was as suddenly and mysteriously present on this night as he had been independently and mysteriously active in behalf of the Defense Committee, for unknown to the Committee, Mr. Bernheimer had written and circulated 30,000 pamphlets to ministers throughout the country. A graduate of Yale in 1917, an air pilot in France during the war, a student of Chinese philosophy, a hermit, he had already been a source of influence to the Committee.

Powerful, cynically courageous, he betrayed his emotion by no conscious sign. Unconsciously, however, he revealed the strain under which he worked, for every once in a while he whispered to himself.

The wire Louis Bernheimer handled kept efficient touch with all who belonged in that office and yet were not there. Inside the office the editor of an Italian paper, Serafino Romualdi, was taking notes, now asking how to spell “monument,” then checking against some other unfamiliar word.

Via the telephone the office knew that Mary Donovan, a lawyer with her, had hurried out to the psychiatric hospital to which the state police had been taking Powers Hapgood even as she had turned to find him somehow mysteriously vanished.

The office knew, too, that Gardner Jackson and his sister, Dr. Edith Jackson, were on their way with Mrs. Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti to the State House to make one last appeal to a cast-iron executive; and that Michael Angelo Musmanno and Aldino Felicani were on their way back from their farewell in the Death House, Mr. Musmanno to act as interpreter for Vanzetti’s sister, Aldino Felicani to return to the Defense office.

What was there for two women to do, for Ruth Hale and for me? An age-old prerogative of women: feed hungry men. Others would be coming in, and they, too, whether they knew it or not would need food. And no food except a bag of peanuts was on that table banked with telegrams, letters and carbons. We went out after coffee and sandwiches and milk.

Waiting, we, too, had coffee on the clean table by the cool window of that little Italian restaurant one flight up. We read there words from a letter which had come from a young editor: “It seems so inextricably intertwined with the most inert and selfish of human motives, the desire to be comfortable, not to be bothered, to maintain the _status quo_, to keep things as they’ve always been, to defend institutions from attack, to get rid of men of that type. Reason is no longer in evidence. And I have yielded momentarily, more than once to the weak wish that it was all over and filed away neatly.”

Quickly now--after seven years of delay--one sort of “filing” would soon be done and over. And then that letter which had come straight out of the heart of youth leapt into flame: “One is removed from life and death, from all emotion, and suspended in a desperate abyss, where calmness and self-control are the things most needed. Events happen, and are seen in crystalline stillness. But the mind, the soul, continue the hopeless struggle, for all is not lost, as long as the desire for justice persists.”

For all is not lost as long as the desire for justice persists! Around the corner from Headquarters over in Salem Street in the rooms of the Hod Carriers’ Union, the “desire” was most certainly persisting. Mother Bloor had come all the way from California to speak for justice for Sacco and Vanzetti. Lola Ridge and John Howard Lawson had passed through Headquarters and had gone over to Salem Street to speak for justice.

As we sat on, quiet in the tense office, messages coming and going, now and then a cup of coffee being poured or a sandwich eaten, in my thoughts were lines from Lola Ridge’s “Two in the Death House” which, repeated to me the week before, she was now chanting over in Salem Street.

“You have endured those moments, you
Close to the rough nap of earth, and knowing her perennial ways.
And when, on some one of your counted mornings, light
That pulls at the caught root of things
Has pierced you with a touch, or leavened air,

* * * * *

You too have hoped--with the ardor of young shoots, renascent under
concrete,
And with them have gone down to defeat again.”[5]

Dos Passos, flitting into the office, called: “It’s more cheerful over there! Come on over!”

Then suddenly, when Miss Hale and I were already halfway down the stairs, from the street came uproar, and the rush of many feet and the sound of hundreds of voices.

Mother Bloor had been arrested for speaking out the window of the Hod Carriers’ Union to some five hundred people who had been unable to get inside.

When the police were heard coming up the stairs of the Hod Carriers’ Union to get her, Fred Beale, a splendid type of young man, threw his arm about Mother Bloor to protect her, saying, “You mustn’t let them get you!”

Brave as always, she disengaged his arm, and said, “You’ll have to let me go with them, Fred!”

And quietly she went away with the police, and from Hanover Street had come the angry shout, “Mother Bloor’s been arrested!”

Putting my hand on Ruth Hale’s arm, I held her where she was. She had done her best to get Crowley to give a permit for the use of Bunker Hill Monument for all who would meet together and speak. And she had failed. Now was not the time for any one to “strike” again.

Dos Passos had disappeared, and we went back up through the outer office and on into the office where messages came and went and there was more silence than speech.

The outer office filled up and emptied intermittently, rich and poor alike coming and going. From a brave mission to plead with the Governor, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and a friend were there, like the brave gentlewomen they are, standing fraternally in the outer office.

From that outer office, too, came the sound of a woman’s voice, curiously deep, speaking with a slight accent: “They wanted us to come over and now they don’t want us. We have worked hard and made sacrifices. They want all the power. We want some power, too, and we are going to have it. During the war, thinking my name was German, the dirty dogs framed me. And then they found I wasn’t German and had to let me go. They think they hold a first mortgage on us, do they? But they--”

Who were “they”? Was that the government, political wealth, or what was it? Were those the terms in which our foreign born now thought of this land of promise?

Mother Bloor, quickly bailed by Mary Donovan and quickly back, was seated in the outer office.

But a small group from the Hod Carriers’ Union was making its way out to Charlestown Prison. There, now, Sacco and Vanzetti were momently expecting the summons to that chair visible from their adjoining cells, with its

“---- cap that pours into the brain
The livid needles of its pain.”[6]

At eleven o’clock the group led by Lola Ridge having received neither orders nor suggestions from Defense Headquarters, they had started, a straggling half hundred, for Charlestown.

In sight of the roofs of the Jail, Lola Ridge had found herself in the lead, holding by the hand a small school-girl who had accompanied them from the start.

Jail in sight the school-girl had said, “Here is where I say good-by to you!”

With a young Scotchman and another girl, Lola Ridge slipped under the ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the Prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her.

As he reined in his horse fairly over her, she heard him whispering in a frightened voice, “What do you want?”

Daring the trooper to ride her down, she refused to leave the rope.

Suddenly there was the uproar of conflict. A group of men from the straggling fifty she had led, had thrown themselves between her and the police now closing in upon her.

A friend, Carline Murphy, knowing, as the men did, that an order had been given for Lola Ridge’s arrest, slipped in beside her.

While the conflict between the men and the police continued, Carline Murphy drew her away, saying, “Lola, come! I know a way to get near the Jail.”

This she did to save her, and, still asserting that she knew a way to get near the Jail, they were lost in the crowd.

Mary Donovan, too, was back again in the inner office. She and the lawyer had seen Powers Hapgood. Now she was urged to drink a cup of coffee and eat a sandwich.

As she bit into the large sandwich, humor flashed over the pale face. “This is what I call strong bread!” she exclaimed.

And while she ate, she was giving an account of Powers Hapgood. Before they were allowed to see him, they had been kept waiting two hours because the Superintendent said he had “to have his little tea.” Admitted, they had found Hapgood in bed and eager to tell his experiences.

When the attendants had asked him why he was there, Powers Hapgood had replied, “For trying to help save Sacco and Vanzetti.”

Then the attendants had called these Italians “wops” and had told Mr. Hapgood he was in the very bed in which Sacco had been.

An attendant said supper was ready.

Would he like some?

What was it?

Beef stew.

And Powers Hapgood had said, “No, I don’t want beef stew. I’m a vegetarian.”

“And after that,” said Mary Donovan, humor bubbling up again, “they were sure he was psychopathic.”

The attendants, who seemed to be a “gentle lot,” had then given Mr. Hapgood an eggnog and some bread and butter.

Gardner Jackson and Dr. Edith Jackson came in. Gardner Jackson sat down by the telephone. There was silence. They had come from the Governor’s office, on their return leaving Rosa Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti at Lilian Haley’s.

Dr. Edith Jackson, her head between her hands, spoke in a trembling voice, “Twice the Governor said, waving his hand toward Rosa Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti, ‘It is these ladies that move me most.’”

And some in that office wondered, “Was it?”

Heard, too, over the Governor’s telephone during that hour was the ringing voice of Attorney Thompson who believed, and still believes in the innocence of these two men.

In the Secretary’s office, where he stayed while the others went in to the Governor with Michael Angelo Musmanno to act as interpreter,--in the Secretary’s office, Gardner Jackson was offered a cigar!

Mary Donovan spoke less and less, answering an occasional inquiry which came from the “friend’s house” where again Rosa Sacco was waiting for the end, but this time not only with faithful, fearless Lilian Haley beside her but also Signorina Vanzetti.

And again at Headquarters all were waiting, with hope, without hope.... On that night of August twenty-second, haunting phrases, aspects of courage that did not flinch, many invisible presences in remembered word and look and act were with those who assembled in Defense Headquarters and wherever a group was gathered together in the name of Sacco and Vanzetti.

At the telephone the voice of Gardner Jackson, as the minutes passed became more and more quiet: “Was the execution to go forward?”

“No news?”

“Bad!”

“No, nothing,--nothing at all!”

So the brief inquiries and monosyllabic answers followed one another.

Beyond the doors of Defense Headquarters events went forward that will never be recorded, and all expressive of sympathy for this tragedy reaching its visible climax.

One experience was that of Helen Peabody, the artist, who also had made her way out to the Jail, got detached from her group, and had been arrested. She was taken into Charlestown Prison where in the guard room a courteous police officer had offered her a chair.

Suddenly she realized that she was within the very walls that held Sacco and Vanzetti,--there where they were about to die. In her thought saluting them, Helen Peabody continued to stand. Placing her hand upon the walls that held Sacco and Vanzetti, she stood at attention in that jail guard room till after midnight.

As midnight approached at Defense Headquarters, even when there was speech there was yet stillness in those offices.

During that hour before midnight Debs was spoken of,--the fact that the last money order he had been able to make out had been for this Committee.

And some one in the office said, “All day thoughts have been repeating a prayer taught when we were children, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’ They have nothing to regret. They are good children. They will sleep well.”

Aldino Felicani, sitting with bent head, answered gently, “What are two lives! It is the ideal.”

It was midnight. Quiet and more quiet, Gardner Jackson was speaking at the telephone.

Madeiros was gone.

Once a thief had hung on either side, the Christ between. Now, two idealists, not one, as if symbol of an achieved fellowship for which Christ had lived and died, and but one thief. These two, atheists though they might be, of the Brotherhood of Christ.

And perhaps in the moment when from Nicola Sacco they were cutting off speech with the straps guards were fixing about his head and the Death House heard him calling out those last words: “Long live anarchy! Farewell my wife and child and all my friends!... Farewell, Mother!” came a cry from Mary Donovan, “I can’t--I can’t believe it!”

Her brother and a friend were swiftly at her side, there was the snap of an ammonia capsule, and control quickly regained. Still that belief in the ultimate kindness of the law.

Vanzetti next,--gentleman of a gentle land, shaking hands with his guards, thanking Warden Hendry for his kindness, and, even as they blindfolded him, from this atheist those Christlike words: “I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”

In the ears of those who stood in that Death House must have rung down two thousand years of time the words of Another, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

Through the inner door of Defense Headquarters tumbled the Italian editor. Unable to speak, the breath in him shaking the whole man, he bit at a roll of papers he held in his hand.

Then, crying out convulsively, “They are gone!” he threw himself head and shoulders, sobbing, upon the table.

And in that moment there was no separation between manhood and tears. They were one and alike beautiful.

Most courteous and most sensitive brother of ours, you meet a double tragedy. _From what_ did you come? _To what_ have you come? Fleeing Fascism in your lovely land, what is it you have gained here in this country of which Sacco wrote as “always in my dreams”?[7] Is it freedom? Is it the ideal? What was it that--the ideal--you hoped of your land of promise?

From the outer office, some weeping, all quietly, they were going down the steep stairs.

In the inner office Mary Donovan spoke, “Come, let us not answer the telephone any more.”

And we went out, in groups or alone, down the stairs, and into the night.

Those thirteen days from August tenth to August twenty-second were over.

Then, after hours that seemed eternity, the way back to the foothills of the Adirondacks where John Brown lies buried. Land of promise, beauty and wealth everywhere! Hills and rushing streams of the Berkshires in the summer sunlight, the deep valley of the Hudson in the heat of afternoon, in the dusk the thin ribbon of water and first cliffs of Lake Champlain.

In my thoughts were another beautiful land and another Brotherhood struggling for justice, Padraic Pearse and his poem “+TO DEATH+”:

Of wealth or of glory
I shall leave nothing behind me
(I think it, O God, enough!)
But my name in the heart of a child.

The train came to an unexpected stop outside a little fortress town, among the first of those historic towns on Lake Champlain.

Above the sudden quiet, I heard a high-pitched woman’s voice, “That Italian case that was on at Boston.”

“When?” asked another woman who sat beside her.

“To-night. But I didn’t get tuned in in time and--”

With a jerk, through the dark, the train went on.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.

[3] _V._ Appendix C., pp. 108-120, for the 505 names of the initial list taken by Paul U. Kellogg, editor of the _Survey_.

[4] The author of “Thirteen Days” has thought many times of the unfairness and omissions inevitable in any attempt to make adequate or accurate records during such days of confusion. Although he will be found among those who stand up and are counted again and yet again, the author does not know the name of the stunted boy with the beautiful face. Another illustration of the incompleteness of such a record as this--if such illustration is needed!--is the fact that several men and women who during those last years were of supreme comfort to the doomed men were those who because of age or illness or distance were not present at the end. For example, Alice Stone Blackwell to whom Vanzetti wrote a very large number of letters.

[5] To be found entire in “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.

[6] From a poem by E. Merrill Root in “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.

[7] “The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,” edited by Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, p. 10.... Students of these issues should read, too, the valuable appendices to “The Letters.”