Boston a novel
time that had happened in the history of the Commonwealth. So nemesis
waits for Red-hunters!
XIII
In the meantime Cornelia Thornwell had got into action
again--impossible to rest. Pleading with the Governor to grant a
respite--but the Governor would not give a hint of his intentions.
Calling up friends and relatives, nagging at them to “do
something”--when they had no idea what to do. “Henry, do you suppose
Fuller can really intend to let those boys die while proceedings are
pending before the courts?”
“I’m afraid he does, Mother”--this over the telephone.
“But what can be in his mind?”
“Well, Mother, it is costing a lot of money to keep this thing going.
Think of the military expenses! And then, it’s bad advertising; every
day it keeps up, things look worse for Fuller and Lowell, and naturally
they want it over with.”
“Do they think they can stop it by a murder?”
“I’m afraid they do, Mother--and what’s more, I’m afraid they are
right. You can’t keep the case alive when the men are dead.”
“Henry, you _must_ do something for me!”
“But what can I do? I have no pull with Fuller, I don’t even drive a
Packard car.” The great lawyer thought for a bit, and added: “Why don’t
you try a little social pressure? Get Deborah or Alice or both of them
to give him and his lady a dinner-party? I’ll come, if it will do any
good.”
Learn how the world is governed, Cornelia--now in your seventy-third
year of life! Once upon a time people did things like this to you, and
you were too gentle and trusting, too much of a “lady” to know it, or
to believe it when it was pointed out to you. But now do it yourself!
Seek out the weak spot in the armor of a motor-car salesman who has
forty million dollars, but no “social position,” and has a Catholic
wife, a cruel handicap in Massachusetts! Get busy at the telephone, and
put it up to your daughters, as hard as you know how--if they have one
particle of love for you in their hearts, if ever they had a particle
of love in their hearts, to spare you this dreadful anguish!
True it is that the motor-car salesman has made public attacks on
Rupert Alvin, calling him an arch-corruptionist and things like that;
but that is just politics, and social life is another thing altogether.
The motor-car salesman will doubtless know what is being done to him;
he is a business man, and does not give something for nothing, nor
expect to get something for nothing. To be received in one of the
greatest homes in New England, to put his feet under the table with
haughty and unapproachable Brahmins--that counts for nothing to him
personally, or so he pretends, being “bull-headed” and defiant; but he
has a wife, and children growing up to the age of marriage, and what
the women and children clamor for cannot be overlooked by the most
self-satisfied of self-made millionaires.
Cornelia had her way. Ladies do in Boston, when they are persistent,
and when they are old. The formal invitation was written by Deborah
Alvin, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and delivered by a chauffeur
at the Governor’s summer home, at Rye Beach in New Hampshire. A couple
of hours later an automobile arrived at the North Shore palace of the
Rupert Alvins, with a formally written acceptance. Deborah got busy,
and invited half a dozen members of the family, and intimate friends
who could be taken into the secret. Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge
came--another stage in her feminist revolt! Alice Thornwell Winters
came, dressed in pale lavender, the color which harmonized with her
aura; having lost a great deal of weight on a humming-bird diet,
she had taken up a new rôle, and was a picture of delicate and
spiritualized melancholy.
The Governor and his lady arrived, in the very latest model of Packard
limousine, custom-built, preceded by a car full of alert-looking men
with bulging hip-pockets, and followed by another carload. Several
posted themselves at the front door, others walked round and round the
house and peered into bushes and under porches. One, who looked and
acted like a guest, wandered about the downstairs rooms all through
the meal; the Commonwealth was taking no chances--especially in a home
where the mother-in-law was one of the most notorious Reds. These
precautions lent an extra thrill to the meal, but good form required
that no one should know anything about them.
The supersalesman sat at the right of his hostess; on the other
side was Alice, and the matter-of-fact and rosy gentleman had never
encountered anything so much like heaven. She told him about his aura,
which was news to him; Deborah told him about her orphan asylum, and
Rupert told about his chapel, and how a bishop from England had praised
the design of the apse. Never a word about the distressing news which
was on the front pages of all the papers! “Cura nulla medicabilis
arte” may have been all right for a poet two thousand years ago, but
the social arts of “old Boston” had mastered all human weakness.
Except that at the end of a delightful evening Deborah led her
distinguished guest to one side, and burdened him for a moment with the
story of how her old mother was suffering so that they feared for her
life; would she be presuming if she asked the Governor to reprieve the
two wretched men for a couple of weeks, until the hope of court action
could be tried out? The supersalesman replied with all the caution
of a skilled politician. It would not do for him to say outright,
because the final decision rested with his Council. But privately,
and in strictest confidence, he would assure Mrs. Alvin of his best
endeavors, and she might convey that information to her mother under
a seal of secrecy. When the ordeal was over, and Cornelia was free to
tell the story to Betty and Joe, she commented upon the way the world
is governed. Said Betty: “Don’t you know, Grannie, the real cause of
the world war--that King Edward of England was not sufficiently polite
to his nephew, Emperor William of Germany?”
XIV
On Monday evening Judge Webster Thayer handed down a decision, to the
effect that he had no jurisdiction to entertain any motion in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. By this ruling he claimed to have avoided passing
upon his own prejudice; but at the same time he said, in open court, “I
had no prejudice.” He said it many times.
On Tuesday morning he gave another decision, refusing the request for
a revocation and stay of sentence. He gave this out from his home in
Worcester, where two police officers watched by day and two by night,
and one followed behind the judge when he went walking with his dog.
In the toilet of a subway station in New York, a bomb had exploded,
wrecking the station and seriously injuring two persons. The friends
of law and order were certain that the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti
had set this bomb; while the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti were equally
certain that their worst enemies had done it. In the State House
in Boston a package had been found in one of the elevators; after
listening for clockwork inside, and hearing nothing, the police had
opened it with many precautions, and found two pounds of chocolate.
Justice Sanderson of the Supreme Judicial Court declared that he had
no power to grant a motion for a new trial; it was a problem how to
bring the matter before the Full Court. Federal Judge Anderson declined
to intervene--in spite of “Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86.” In fact
he thought that decision worked the other way. A difficult matter
to make a science out of the law, when no one could determine what
it meant, and there were no angels to administer it! Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court said that he had no
authority, but pointed out that they were at liberty to try some judge
of the circuit court; however, the judges of the circuit court advised
trying the supreme court. It was as Bart had noted long ago--everybody
put the problem off on somebody else!
Hill and Field and Musmanno went racing about from one court to
another, and from one summer resort to another--wherever a judge might
be intercepted. Behind them chased Attorney General Reading, his
pockets full of money from the Decimo Club and the “L.A.W.”; and behind
him one or more carloads of reporters, liberally provided with funds
by large-scale purveyors of sensation. Hill made another appeal to the
Governor for a stay; and the Governor announced that he would not grant
the request. That was Tuesday afternoon, and the execution was set for
Wednesday midnight.
“What does that mean, Deborah?”--it was Cornelia phoning to her
daughter, tormented with anxiety.
“I don’t know, Mother. I only know what he told me. He may have his
reasons. We ought not to talk about it over the telephone.” So there
was nothing to do but wait, and guess at the tortuous motives of a
supersalesman of automobiles, whose heart was set upon moving to the
White House.
Betty and Joe were absorbed in frantic efforts to awaken public
opinion. The respectable lawyers were out of favor now, and it was
permitted to make “propaganda.” The committee had issued a call for
a hundred thousand persons to come to Boston and voice the protest
of America against judicial murder. About two hundred came. For the
most part they only added to the confusion, because there was no one
to organize them or put them to work. No two had the same idea of what
should be done; and when they came to the committee, they found exactly
the same state of disagreement.
Many of the group from New York, especially the liberals and the
lawyers, thought that the crucial issue was the Department of Justice
files. They started a clamor: “Open the files!” Several newspapers
took it up. But this program met with strong opposition from the
Italian anarchists. Could there be things in these files which Italian
anarchists did not want to see upon the front pages of newspapers?
The liberals got so far as to induce the Department of Justice to say
that the files would be turned over to Governor Fuller or to President
Lowell, if either would ask for them; but these worthies took exactly
the same attitude as the anarchists, and for exactly the same reason.
There were more things in the class struggle than were dreamed of in
the philosophy of amiable liberals.
XV
One thing all sympathizers could do, and that was to get arrested. Over
at socialist headquarters in Essex Street was a little group which had
a program, and an organization to carry it out. A group of students
came there, and placards and sandwich signs were made, calling upon
Governor Fuller for justice. Young men and women sallied forth--and as
they emerged from the building, a squad of police fell upon them, and
took away the signs and tore them to pieces. So the job had to be done
all over; the signs were prepared secretly, and would-be paraders came
one by one to the place of demonstration, hiding their signs until they
were on the picket-line.
On Tuesday afternoon some thirty paraders made their appearance in
front of the State House, each wearing a placard with a Sacco-Vanzetti
argument upon it. For a while the police let them alone, and contented
themselves with keeping the crowd on the other side of the street.
On the Beacon Street front of the State House there is an iron
picket-fence, which curves in towards the main entrance, making a large
half moon; so there was a comfortable space for paraders, and a chance
for their sentiments to be legible. They walked in silence, keeping
in motion, paying no attention to any one: a form of demonstration
which had first been used on Broadway, New York, during the Colorado
coal strike, and had been taken up by the Boston suffragists at the
time of President Wilson’s visit, when Cornelia and Betty and Mrs.