Boston a novel
propriety! Not so long ago, the great Lowell had dealt a strong punch
to the Jewish jaw, in the shape of a program to limit the percentage of
such students allowed in Harvard; he proposed to do it openly, instead
of secretly, as the custom was. He gave his reasons--among them that
one hundred per cent of the books stolen from the university library
were stolen by Jews. When this statement was investigated, the evidence
turned out to be that one Jewish student had one library book which he
had forgotten.
And now here were the Harvard alumni, rallying to the aid of their
blue-blood president, by refusing to contribute to the law school
endowment, so long as Felix Frankfurter remained a professor; they were
making a regular campaign out of this. Among those who had publicly
joined it was Mr. Ranney, the new assistant district attorney from
Norfolk County, who had been opposing the Sacco-Vanzetti defense before
the Governor; also that blandly smiling blue-blood lawyer, Mr. Joseph
Wiggin, who had been the Governor’s private counsel, present at all
hearings. “You see what kind of advice Fuller is getting!” said Henry
Cabot Winters.
X
Disputes at headquarters of the Sacco-Vanzetti committee; factions
clashing, radicals jeering at conservatives. “Now you see! You obeyed
your respectable lawyers! You were good, and didn’t make any noise,
you trusted to legal precedents--and where have you got? If you had
listened to us, if you had spent the money to make an appeal to labor,
we could have had a general strike now, and the boys would have been
saved!” But even now the conservatives wouldn’t agree. Mrs. Evans
thought it necessary to bow to the Governor’s decision; while the
communists wanted to make a mass appeal for a strike all over the
country. Impossible to decide on a single move; and meantime the clock
was ticking away the minutes and hours of the victims’ lives!
Those who believed in picketing and street demonstrations proceeded
to organize and send out a call for martyrs. On Sunday afternoon
there were to be mass meetings on the Common; the socialists and the
communists each had a “tree,” and as usual, they announced rival
meetings. Superintendent of Police Michael J. Crowley announced
that he would attend both. For the first time in Boston history
the entire police force of twenty-two hundred men were on what was
known as “twenty-four hour duty.” All vacations were canceled, extra
men were brought from other cities, the firemen were sworn in as
deputies, the state constabulary were ready with armored cars, riot
guns, searchlights and gas bombs. Said the sharp-tongued Betty, “The
Commonwealth has told ten thousand lies, and each lie must have a club
and a gun to protect it!”
Between Boston Common and the park known as the Public Gardens there
extends a wide esplanade, half a mile long, lined with old elm trees;
since as far back in history as the oldest citizen’s great-grandfather
could remember, this had been the temple of Boston’s free speech.
The trees were numbered, and every Sunday afternoon the advocates of
anything would have a tree assigned to them, where they might set up a
soap box and stand thereon, and say what they pleased to all who cared
to listen--with only such interference as came from the voices of the
orators under the other trees.
But now the government of Massachusetts had officially endorsed ten
thousand lies, and staked its official existence upon them; the
one thing it could not stand was to have these lies exposed to the
general gaze. Under the socialist tree were women carrying banners,
containing the sentence once spoken by the just and upright and utterly
unprejudiced Mr. Justice Thayer. He was to speak again from the bench
to-morrow morning, and tell all the world how just and upright and
utterly unprejudiced he was. Now here was a banner: “Did you see what I
did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” The makers of the banner
had left the bad word blank, but that did not improve matters, because
there is no limit to what the human imagination may insert in a blank.
People might imagine the worst of all possible expressions, so bad that
it had never been printed in any newspaper. If they did imagine that,
they would be right; and so it was necessary for the Commonwealth to
resort to clubs and bullets.
XI
Alfred Baker Lewis, devoted young secretary of the Socialist Party,
was denouncing the Governor’s decision, when Michael J. Crowley came
pushing his way through the crowd, demanding to see his permit.
Burly Irish-Catholic Mike, known as “Mickey the Gunman” to the
striking policemen, and called even worse names by the booksellers
of Boston, whose boss and master he was. For among the many duties
of a superintendent of police in that pious city is to supervise the
books which the literati may purchase. In the course of the past two
years Mike had barred some seventy of the leading novels of the day,
practically everything which an intelligent man or woman would want to
read.
And so to-day; the public would be forbidden to hear every word that
could interest an intelligent citizen. The Salvation Army would
go on banging its drum, and the Holy Rollers would continue their
contortions; but protest against legalized murder would be met with
clubs, and if necessary with bullets.
“Let me see your permit,” commanded the superintendent of police; and
when the orator produced it, Mike announced, “This permit is canceled
and the meeting is forbidden.” When the young socialist attempted to
protest, “You are not going to argue this case in public,” said the
majestic Mike--just that and no more; he said it several times, so that
every citizen of Boston might feel the full weight of the civic insult.
“You are not going to argue this case in public!” Only in the council
chamber at the State House, before elderly academic autocrats who would
doctor the record when they got through, and keep the public from
knowing what blunders they had made!
“This meeting will disperse!” shouted Mike, to the sixteen thousand
persons crowded round him; and the blue-clad “cops” began their
onslaught--“for every lie a club or a bullet!”
“Come over to our tree! We have a permit!” shouted the communists;
so the crowd swarmed over there and Mike came also, and repeated his
performance, confiscating another permit. But the communist was not so
obedient as the socialist--he went on trying to speak, and was hauled
off the soap box and surrounded by policemen, and dragged off to the
waiting patrol-wagon. Three other persons they arrested--one of them
Edward Holton James, of Concord, nephew of the novelist who wrote like
a psychologist and of the psychologist who wrote like a novelist.
A persistent person, Mr. James; perhaps it came from living in Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s back-yard. He had stood up in Germany, during the
war, and said what he thought about the Kaiser. The Germans, not
understanding Concord, had decided that he must be insane, so they
had shipped him into Holland; whereupon he had promptly got himself
smuggled back in a load of merchandise, and stood up again and said
what he thought about the Kaiser, and spent three years in a fortress
for it.
Now he was so naïve as to think that he owned a share of the Common,
and had a right to speak there, and to refuse to be dragged off.
He resisted being dragged, and went so far as to slap one of the
officers--with the flat of his hand. They taught him his lesson,
regardless of his blue-blood and his money; when the “cop” got him
alone in the cell he gave him one on the side of the jaw, and Mr. James
“passed out,” as the saying is, and when he came to he had a cracked
jawbone, to keep him quiet for a while.
XII
Arthur Dehon Hill arguing before Judge Thayer in Dedham Court-house,
with the round white dome and portholes like an ocean liner. Silver
hair and rosy cheeks, his manner of subtle banter now replaced by
burning indignation, that a judge with such a record as Web’s, and
knowing in his heart such prejudice as Web’s, should be insisting
upon deciding a motion involving two human lives. The lawyer invited
the judge to consider how he would feel if the followers of Lenin had
seized the government of Massachusetts, and were trying him according
to the precedents he had set! He told Web to his face that he had
been unfit to try the case from the beginning; he cited in open court
what the Lowell commission had said about him--that in talking about
the case off the bench he had committed “a grave breach of official
decorum.” Could any man hear such words about himself, and not be
affected by them? Web’s answer was that the chief justice of the
Superior Court had instructed him to cut short his vacation and hear
this motion. “And I am here,” said Web, in a low voice. His face was
gray, his hands trembling, his eyes blinking fast. His court-house was
well guarded that day.
New evidence had been discovered. A young fellow by the name of Candido
di Bona had been standing on the street in South Braintree when the
bandit-car went by, and now made affidavit that neither Sacco nor
Vanzetti was in that car. This evidence was what the Lowell Commission
would have called “merely cumulative”; there were already thirty-one
persons who had made such statements, either at the trial or in later
affidavits, and Web Thayer knew of them all, and intended to pay no
more heed to the thirty-second than he had paid to the thirty-first.
He thought that he no longer had jurisdiction; that after sentence
had been passed, no judge of the Superior Court could entertain any
motion. To this the lawyer argued vehemently that nothing could deprive
accused men of an elemental right. “I believe that if there is new and
important evidence, the courts have the power to consider it, even
after sentence has been pronounced--even down to the time the men are
strapped in the electric chair. I do not believe the laws intended the
courts to regard these men as legally dead as soon as sentence was
pronounced.”
Arthur K. Reading, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, had been instructed by the Governor to follow Mr. Hill
in his peregrinations among the courts and make certain that he didn’t
get anything. Handsome, genial, and a good fellow, Mr. Reading was a
bitter foe of all Reds, and the aiders and abettors of Reds. Said he:
“I have just heard the most preposterous argument that I have ever
heard from an able lawyer.” He expressed his horror at “this attack on
the court for which I have the highest regard.” He proclaimed that,
“Ours is a government of laws.” Such reverence for laws and courts this
noble gentleman had--and even while he was orating, his pockets were
stuffed full of money, collected from various organizations which had
been warned by Arthur K. Reading as counsel that they were in danger of
prosecution by Arthur K. Reading as attorney general!
The “Decimo Club” was an ingenious organization which sold memberships
to persons who hoped to get rich quickly; but the only ones who did get
rich were the promoters of the club, and their legal counsel. A couple
of months ago they had secretly handed a check for twenty-five thousand
dollars to Mr. Reading, and immediately thereafter he had given to the
newspaper reporters an interview telling them that the Decimo Club was
all right. He had performed similar “legal services” for the “L.A.W.,”
an automobile stock-selling scheme with curiously involved features.
Altogether he had collected about ninety thousand dollars in such
“fees,” and within ten months of the time that he had demanded the life
of Sacco and Vanzetti, he was to be formally indicted by the House of
Representatives and driven from his high office in disgrace--the first