Boston a novel
hand, if a common person said or did anything out of the ordinary, he
would reveal a remarkable talent for ungraciousness.
Injustice did not exist in the world; it was a delusion contrived by
cunning agitators, and they were not going to fool the mighty mind of
the President of Harvard University. A characteristic moment early
during the hearing, when the witness Pierce, a shoe-worker who had
refused to identify Sacco as the bandit, told how he had lost his
job at the factory for this refusal; he was “fired,” and one of the
convicting jurymen had taken his place. Also another witness had lost
his position for refusing to identify. “What does this tend to prove?”
demanded the irritable Judge Grant. The answer of the lawyers was,
“It proves duress.” Said Lowell, with contempt which took in lawyers,
witnesses, and his own colleague: “Oh, don’t you see, they claim this
was all nothing but a frame-up.”
Infallibility was his prerogative upon three different counts: as a
millionaire, as a college president, and as a Lowell. There was a
popular quatrain about the city of Boston, as “the home of the bean and
the cod, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak
only to God.” Never for an instant did it occur to this great man to
doubt that he could wade into a mass of complications and determine the
truth in a month. With complete insouciance he would make statements
of fact about crime and criminals, which experts knew to be nonsense.
“This cannot be so” ... “they do not do that” ... and so on.
V
The fallibilities of academic autocracy were strikingly revealed in the
reception accorded to an eccentric lady who was sent over by Governor
Fuller to tell her story to the Commission. Let “Tootsie Toodles” be
her name--it was no less melodious. The newspapers had called her
a “mystery witness,” but she was no mystery to the defense--on the
contrary, an open volume, ancient and much handled. She was, according
to Lowell’s euphemistic phrase, “not unimpeachable in conduct”; also
she was an hysterical fantast. Prior to the Dedham trial, she had come
to the defense lawyer, and told an elaborate story, offering to repeat
it on the witness-stand. But there was some dispute about the price,
and she went to the prosecution and offered to tell a story for them.
She went back and forth between the two sides, until she had ruined
herself with both--they realized that she was mentally irresponsible.
Ranney, the assistant district attorney representing the government
at the Lowell hearings, knew all this, and admitted the woman’s “not
unimpeachable” record. He grinned at the scene; when the three old
gentlemen were not watching, he made motions of wheels going round in
his head--a schoolboy sign for an insane person. There came a former
employer of Tootsie, Mr. Jackson, and the commission asked him, “What
of her mentality?” The answer was, “She’s twelve ounces to the pound.”
President Lowell of Harvard inquired, “What does that mean?” and the
witness replied. “She’s not all there.” The great educator enlarged his
vocabulary considerably before he got through with this adventure--it
was a sort of slumming expedition for him. They brought in the former
chief of police of South Braintree, who said that he had known Tootsie
since she was born, and she was “what you’d call a nut.” But he was
mistaken; Mr. Lowell would never have called any person or anything by
a word of one syllable.
The three important gentlemen, looking for any sort of evidence
to save the good name of their Commonwealth, received Tootsie--it
would not be proper to say with open arms, considering her “not
unimpeachable conduct”--but with that polished and perfected elegance
which blue-blood gentlemen display to all ladies when they meet them
socially. When Tootsie stood up, they all stood up, and bowed--it was
like a court reception, or a Harvard commencement.
Her story was that she had known Sacco in the year 1908, when they had
both worked in the Rice and Hutchins shoe-factory--he was a “laster,”
she said. She had seen him on the street in South Braintree on April
15th, 1920, a few hours before the crime, standing near the alleged
bandit car. She heard a man whom she declared to be Vanzetti say to
him, “Hurry up and finish this job. I have to be back in Providence at
three o’clock and dig clams.”
There were slight errors in this story. It wasn’t Providence to which
Vanzetti had to get back; they don’t dig clams in Providence, so it
must have been Plymouth. Also it was a slip about Sacco having been
a “laster” in the Rice and Hutchins factory in 1908, for in April of
that year he had landed in America, a lad of seventeen who had never
seen a shoe-factory. He had gone to work carrying water to laborers in
Hopedale, and it wasn’t until four years later, after his marriage,
that he had learned shoe-work.
All this, of course, was known to Thompson, and he set out to establish
it. His first question was: “What time did you say that Sacco first
worked in the Rice and Hutchins factory, what year?”
And Tootsie, who knew what he was driving at, started up and began to
scream. “What is the idea of my coming up and talking with you when I
come in here to-day to have my character overhauled? Has my character
got anything to do with what I saw and what I heard?”
Said Lowell, majestically: “You will oblige the Committee by answering
questions. We won’t allow your character to be assailed.”
Said Tootsie, louder yet--so loud that for the first time the newspaper
reporters could attend the sessions through the tightly closed doors:
“My character is just as good as yours, or Sacco’s or Vanzetti’s, or
any of that gang that you have got down there and what they do. I will
not allow my character to be overhauled.”
Said Lowell: “Nobody is overhauling your character.”
Said Ranney, the assistant district attorney: “Answer that question.”
So Tootsie replied: “1908.” She added: “If I am wrong I will say I am
wrong.” Even the members of the Commission smiled at this. But their
appreciation of it was superficial; they could hardly be expected to
realize that Tootsie, entirely by accident, had provided the best
summing up of the Boston Brahmins to be found in the literature of the
world. If I am wrong I will say that I am wrong! But don’t _you_ dare
to say it!
For an hour Thompson read passages from Tootsie’s earlier statement,
inconsistent with the story she was now telling; and always her answer
was that the stenographer was crooked and had written the wrong
answers. She became more and more excited, and screamed louder and
louder, until Lowell stopped the proceedings, and Judge Grant, greatly
agitated, toddled across the room, exclaiming, “I will get her a glass
of ice-water.” He trembled so that he poured a part of it down her neck.
Ranney came out of the room disgusted, and told the reporters that
Tootsie was “so loud” and “so unreliable” that Katzmann had refused to
use her, for fear she would “break up the case.” So the reporters for
once had an “inside” story. They published it, to the annoyance of the
Commission, and also of Tootsie. She read, and set out forthwith for
the office of the Boston _Post_, a perfectly respectable capitalist
newspaper, strongly Catholic. She interviewed a reporter, and told him
that the stories were all wrong, that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti
to be quite innocent of the crime of which they had been convicted.
The person she had seen in South Braintree was the brother of a friend
of hers, who happened to look like Sacco. The _Post_ published this
correction; and the defense produced the _Post_ report before the
Commission, to prove what had happened.
The lawyers for the defense naturally took it for granted that the
absurdity of the whole affair was obvious. But when the report of the
Commission appeared, they discovered to their consternation that the
three elderly gallants had accepted Tootsie Toodles as one of their
reasons for sending Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair! Said the
greatest man in Massachusetts, and therefore in the world:
“The woman is eccentric, not unimpeachable in conduct; but the
Committee believe that in this case her testimony was well worth
consideration.”
VI
Two things the three elderly gentlemen desired ardently to do: one,
to prove that the defense at the Dedham trial had hired perjury; the
other to break the alibi of Sacco in Boston on the day of the South
Braintree crime. Everything which they did upon their own initiative
was directed to these two ends; and it was only while this was going
on that they failed to be impatient and bored. They had laid down the
program that they would themselves summon no witnesses except the
members of the jury, and Messrs. Katzmann and Thayer. But in the midst
of the proceedings they suddenly forgot this rule, and without warning
to the defense lawyers summoned to the State House two Italians, Bosco
and Guadagni, who had testified at the Dedham trial that Sacco had had
lunch with them on the day of the crime.
The Italians were asked to repeat their story, which owed its certainty
as to date to the fact that it was the day of a banquet given to
Williams, editor of the _Transcript_. Guadagni, a socialist, had been
rebuked by Sacco and the others for proposing to attend an affair in
honor of a militarist. Guadagni was the orator whom Cornelia had met
during the Plymouth Cordage strike, a friend of Vanzetti’s from the
beginning, and original organizer of the defense committee; he had
become one of the editors of an Italian daily paper, _La Notizia_.
A ruddy-cheeked little man with sharply-pointed black beard and
mustaches, speaking English with an accent, he told the three great
gentlemen of the Governor’s Commission what he remembered; and then
to his astonishment he became the object of a persistent attack by
the President of Harvard University, who thought he had the Italian
trapped in a fraud. Ten days previously Lowell had consulted the files
of the Boston _Transcript_, and found that there had been no banquet
to Williams on April 15th; he had consulted the files of the _Gazzetta
del Massachusetts_, an Italian weekly, and both papers agreed that the
banquet to Williams had been on May 13th. Williams, now in Washington,
had been consulted, and agreed that that was correct.
An unhappy moment for the two lawyers, Thompson and Ehrmann,
representing the Sacco-Vanzetti defense in its later stages. They had
had nothing to do with the Dedham trial, and if there had been any
“framing” of witnesses, they did not know it. They had received no
warning in this matter of Bosco and Guadagni, and so, of course, they
were helpless. “Might there not possibly have been two banquets?”
suggested Thompson; but Lowell waved that inept suggestion aside with
a peculiar little gesture of the hand, a series of quick motions,
characteristic of him. “Do not disturb the operations of this mighty
brain,” it seemed to say. Aloud he replied, “No, no, no, it cannot be.
I have investigated the matter.” The lawyer, greatly distressed, turned
against his own witnesses, saying that Mr. Lowell was a man of honor,
and the witnesses should admit the whole truth.
A trying situation for two humble self-educated strangers, there in the
stately executive chambers under the golden dome. Said Guadagni: “If I
am not crazy, there was banquet on fifteenth April. If I not tell truth
I go jail.” He insisted that he would find a record of it, and Lowell
waved him aside with a gesture of disgust; all these wops were alike,
there was no truth in them. “Very well,” said he. “Bring the record
to-morrow morning if you find it.” And the pair went crestfallen away.
VII
But next morning early they turned up at the law office of William G.