Boston a novel
meaning, and no other meaning. The actual words written by Madeiros had
been: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company
crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”
Then, an even shrewder trick--a little masterpiece of treachery, as
cunningly contrived as the Proctor evasion, and Katzmann’s bogus answer
to it, and “Web” Thayer’s obfuscations of both! The supersalesman
summed up Sacco’s alibi--that he “claimed to have been at the Italian
consulate in Boston on that date but the only confirmation of this
claim is the memory of a former employee of the consulate who made a
deposition in Italy,” etc. Study that sentence, all forgers, traducers
and betrayers of all future time, and learn how to smile and be
a villain still! The art of falsifying while seeming to tell the
truth has never been carried to a higher stage--not in any form of
supersalesmanship yet devised in the great empire of superproduction,
or taught in the Graduate School of Business Administration of Harvard
University.
Strictly and literally, it was the truth that Sacco had produced only
one witness to testify that he had been “at the Italian Consulate in
Boston on that date.” But Sacco had produced five other witnesses who
testified that he had been _in Boston_ on that date! Affe, the grocer,
had testified that Sacco had paid him a bill, and Affe had produced
on the stand a notebook with a memorandum of the payment, showing the
date. Bosco and Guadagni, the editors, had testified to lunching with
Sacco in Boni’s restaurant on that day, and Dentamaro, department
manager of a bank, and Williams, an advertising agent, had testified
to joining the group and chatting. Still more to the point, several
of these witnesses had testified that Sacco, in the course of the
talk, had told them the purpose for which he was in Boston, to visit
the consulate and get his passports! Oh, treachery and double-dealing
beyond all imagining--first, the Lowell commission hushing Bosco and
Guadagni to silence, and doctoring the record of the proceedings in
order to keep the story from the public; and then the mighty super
salesman, stepping onto the rostrum and addressing the whole civilized
world, telling it that Bosco and Guadagni did not exist!
V
Cornelia lay in bed, a reaction from the long strain. The Negro maid
brought her coffee and toast, but she could not eat; she lay like one
dead. It was all over for her; she had done all she could, struggled
all she could--so she told herself. The young people might go on, Joe
might write newspaper stories, trying to rouse a heedless public;
Betty might organize mass meetings and speeches on the Common, but the
runaway grandmother’s race was run.
She had to lie there and bring herself to face the thought of the
electric chair. Through all these seven dreadful years, she had refused
to face it--a game of self-deception; but Bart and Nick had been right
all along--they had known that the thought must be faced, and they had
done it. They had the will, and the philosophy; they had been able to
talk about it and joke. Now Cornelia must do the same thing. Remember
what somebody had told her--it does not hurt, because the current
destroys the brain before there is time for a sensation. And when it
is over, it is really over; other persons may worry for you, but you
don’t worry for yourself. Also, you are a martyr, you have accomplished
something for the cause you love.
That was what she must manage to realize. Persuade herself that there
was a new generation coming, that would care where this one was
indifferent; that would count it as something important that two wops
had denied themselves happiness so that justice might be born into the
world! Think about those young persons of the future; lie here and shut
your eyes, and let them come into your presence and speak to you; feel
their gentle hands upon your forehead, bidding you to rest, your tense
nerves to relax and your heart to stop pounding.
Cornelia lay wrestling thus; and into her mind came drifting words
of comfort. “Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our
triumph.” Vanzetti speaking; where had she heard him say those
words? On a chair by her bedside was a scrap-book, full of letters,
manuscripts, clippings. She was moved to sit up and turn the pages;
here it was. Shortly after Judge Thayer had sentenced the two men to
die, Cornelia had persuaded a reporter for the North American Newspaper
Alliance to go to Dedham with her, and see what kind of men these
alleged bandits were. Now, reading the interview, Cornelia recalled
every detail of the scene; the prisoners coming down from their tier of
cells, getting a glimpse of sunshine in the central hall, and lighting
up with it--Nick, with his “kid’s” grin, Bart with his mature and
gentle smile. The reporter, Phil D. Stong, a big fellow, rather blond
German face, well-fed and well-groomed--on an expense account, as he
told Cornelia, with a laugh; tender-hearted, with the sentimentality
of his race--and struck dumb by the discovery of two men of this
transparent sincerity and fine idealism in the shadow of the electric
chair, face to face with their last enemy and not afraid of him. He
had listened, while the victims did the talking; then he had gone away
and tried to make a picture of the scene for the readers of a chain of
newspapers.
“Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written
in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face. Tears touch the
young man ‘Nick’s’ eyes for a moment, brightly, but his voice is
steady. He is married to a sweet-faced little Italian woman. They
have two children.
“In a moment, Nick, with his smooth pompadour, and his boy’s face,
is laughing with the deputy sheriff in argument about prison fare.
“Vanzetti regards one kindly, but appraisingly. A ferocious
mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought
is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence
has made an anchorite.”
And then a glimpse of prison life:
“Up from the shops comes a file of gray men, arms folded, faces
expressionless--a rhythm of steps and faces.
“‘They been working.’ Sacco’s fingers move nervously. ‘God, when
I cannot work I almost go crazy. My fingers used to be busy. I
beg, I argue--give me something to do--I shovel coal, anything. At
last, they give me brick to clean--after three years. You see me
now? I gain a pound a day for thirty days.’ The deputy sheriff nods
confirmation.
“‘First they give me basket to weave, like children. Better than
nothing, but not much. Then I sit alone--seven years--thousands
of days--and all for say man’s nature can be perfect--day after
day--nothing do--breathe, eat, sit up, lie down--because I think
man innerly noble--not beast--’
“Vanzetti interrupts his companion gently. He knows the two
visitors believe in the enforced regulations which restrain
fallible humanity.
“‘We’re capitalists,’ he says smiling, and pointing to the line of
workers. (Men under sentence of death are given no work.) ‘We have
home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re non-producers--live off other
man’s work. When libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me
names.’
“Sacco gurgles with amusement. The deputy sheriff appears
significantly. Suddenly one realizes that these men are to die in a
straight wooden chair, just as the world begins its summer holidays.
“Nick and Vanzetti see the new expression and understand. They
smile, gravely, sympathetically, as men smile at a child’s troubles.
“‘If it had not been for these thing,’ says Vanzetti, ‘I might
have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men.
I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a
failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life
can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s
onderstanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
“‘Our words--our lives--our pains--nothing! The taking of our
lives--lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler--all! That
last moment belong to us--that agony is our triumph!’
“Not declaimed, just said simply.”
VI
There were tears in Cornelia’s eyes as she finished. “Oh, beautiful!
Beautiful!” And when Joe came in, later in the day, she showed him the
clipping. “Those are marvelous words--those two paragraphs at the end.
I wonder if you couldn’t quote them again, and get people to read them.”
Joe said that he would try it. In order to give a touch of drama, he
put a headline: “Vanzetti to his Judges.” The two paragraphs were taken
up and reproduced in labor papers, and became, as it were, a spiritual
testament of Vanzetti, an untheological prayer which his friends
carried about with them, and read while he was dying, and afterwards.
Because of the title, people assumed that the words had been a part
of a speech in court; but this was not so, they were spoken, quite
simply and casually, to a newspaper reporter, the every-day stuff of
Vanzetti’s mind.
History records that those who heard the Gettysburg address of Abraham
Lincoln were ill pleased by it. They found it brief and inadequate,
and gave all their praise to the flowery discourse of the great Edward
Everett of Boston. But the future seldom chooses words which are
flowery; it chooses those which have been wrung from the human heart
in moments of great suffering, and which convey a gleam of spiritual
illumination. When such words have been spoken, we discover what Paul
meant when he wrote, “this mortal shall put on immortality.” School
children learn them by heart, and libraries are written to interpret
them; they are graven upon marble and cast in bronze; armies carry them
on banners, temples arise to glorify them, and civilizations are built
in their image.
Pass on, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, your work is done! You have fought the
good fight, you have finished the race! Fear not the executioner, nor
yet the raging slanderer--they are powerless to harm you, for you
have carried out your life-purposes--including that incidental one of
becoming a great master of English prose! You have spoken the noblest
words heard in America in the two generations since Abraham Lincoln
died! You have achieved what is called the “grand manner,” so rare in
literature! That simplicity whereby men become as little children, and
enter into the kingdom of heaven; that dignity which causes the critics
to bow their haughty heads; that tenderness which touches the heart,
that rapture which fires it, that sublimity which brings men to their
knees!
In short, old Bart, you have brought the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
back into the literary world again! After many years, New England has
another great writer--for a short while only, until it has sent two
thousand volts of electricity through his brain! What an odd freak of
history, that this great one should be a despised wop! That, after all
the millions spent upon education, he should not be a graduate of a
college, nor even of a high school! That he should not even be able to
spell correctly, nor to pronounce correctly, the language of which he
is to be the glory!
What a satire upon great endowments, the huge masses of steel and
stone, the deans and professors of this and that long-winded subject!
As a result of their labors, there are a million persons in the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts who understand the correct use of past
participles, and would not say, “I might have live”; yet there is not
a single one of these millions who can speak a sentence that stands a
chance of living! There are ten thousand graduates of Harvard College,
every one of whom knows better than to say “onderstand” or “joostice”;