Boston a novel
Henderson and her daughter had gone to jail. The city had passed a
special ordinance to meet that form of insurrection; it provided
against “sauntering and loitering,” and the suffrage women had called
it “loitering for liberty.”
Too bad that so many of the demonstrators were foreigners, especially
Russians and Jews, who were disliked in Boston. Such names as
Berkowitch and Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck
and Shklar did not produce a good effect when read aloud over morning
codfish-balls and coffee. But when you call for martyrs you cannot
be fastidious, and your recruits will probably come from the martyr
races--especially the Jews, who discovered the idea. So Berkowitch and
Borofsky, Dalevitch and Hurwitz, Timchuck and Suchuck and Shklar, male
and female, walked up and down in front of the high stone building with
the golden dome, their faces pale and set with determination. With
them walked Alfred Baker Lewis representing the socialists, and Harry
J. Canter and Bertram Wolfe representing the communists, and Grace
Hutchins representing Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.
State House guards lined the picket-fence, and square-jawed, hard-faced
“plainclothesmen” slipped in and out among the crowd. The statue of
Daniel Webster surveyed the scene impassively; also the tall equestrian
figure of General Hooker, green with verdigris, and white with the
droppings of birds on top of his head. From the windows above, the
State House gang looked down, and cursed, or cracked their jokes;
the bootleggers and friends of bootleggers, the sellers of public
privileges, the boon companions of large scale plunderers, who had
millions to spend for immunity.
Over on the other side of Beacon Street was the Shaw monument,
glorifying a young Harvard aristocrat who had given his life to raise
Negro slaves to manhood. Here walked “cops” with clubs in their hands
and guns on their hips, wondering how long it would be before they
were turned loose on the “Bolshevikis”; also members of the American
Legion, stirring up the crowd, crying their hatred of the “goddam
Reds.” Few of the spectators needed any incitement; their heads were
stuffed with the contents of newspapers, and they were sure the
“Guinneys” were guilty, and should have been “burned” long ago.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the number of the paraders had grown
to a hundred and twenty-five, and the police decided that it had gone
far enough. Captain McDevitt appeared and read the riot act. Under
the law the “saunterers and loiterers” had seven minutes in which
to disperse. When they continued marching, the police surrounded
thirty-nine of them, and loaded them into patrol-wagons, and carted
them to the old Joy Street police station, followed by a crowd
shouting, “Beat them up! Hang them!” That was just words, of course;
Massachusetts is a law-abiding Commonwealth, fitting completely into
the formula of Lenin which Betty Alvin was so fond of quoting: “The
state is a monopoly of violence.”
XVI
The monopolists of violence were making their preparations for such a
show of their commodity as no city in America had ever witnessed in
time of peace. The old Charlestown prison was turned into an arsenal;
a cupola-crowned, octagon-shaped building of hand-cut stone, with
red-brick wings covered with ivy, its walls now had dozens of machine
guns mounted on top, and stores of ammunition, and sixteen searchlights
playing at night. Eight hundred policemen, carrying riot guns with
bayonets, took possession of the streets approaching the prison, and
roped them off, stopping all traffic over Prison Point Bridge, and on
Rutherford Avenue, a main thoroughfare, for half a mile. They were
posted on all the house-tops surrounding the prison. In front of the
gates were a hundred mounted Boston troopers, and a hundred of the
state constabulary riding the streets. Firemen were on hand with high
pressure hoses to repel mobs, and there was a plentiful store of tear
and gas bombs, gas masks and bullet-proof vests.
All day Wednesday the eight hundred and eighty-one inmates of the
prison went their usual round, with arms folded and lips shut. They
were not supposed to know what was going on; but rumor spreads in
penitentiaries, as fast as anywhere else. All the prisoners knew that
the death-sentence was to be carried out at midnight, unless the courts
or the Governor intervened. They knew that eighteen Western Union wires
had been run into the officers’ club of the prison, and that reporters
were swarming there to send out the news of the execution. At nine
o’clock the prison lights winked out one by one; but nobody went to
sleep.
In the death-house, in three narrow cells side by side, were the
condemned men; Sacco and Vanzetti and Madeiros, the Portuguese who had
managed to hitch his fate onto theirs. Sacco was on the fourth week of
a “hungry strike,” and Vanzetti was also fasting; they were haggard and
wasted, gray and grim. No one was permitted to see them, except their
lawyers and relatives. Vanzetti had a sister on her way from Italy; if
he were executed according to schedule she would not see him alive. The
mother and sister of Madeiros had come for a visit; also Rosina Sacco,
who spent her time trying to persuade her husband to sign some papers
for the lawyers. But he was more stubborn than ever before. “They have
had me nailed to the cross for seven years. Why should I keep it up?”
Rosina broke down and had to be carried away.
The newspapermen noted that Sacco and Vanzetti did not behave like
other condemned criminals; they did not chat with their keepers, nor
sit and play cards with them, shoving the cards under the barred doors
of the cells. They preferred to brood, staring at a little square patch
of sunlight which fell from the roof upon the floor, the only reminder
of the outside world. At night, when the searchlights played upon the
death-house, they saw nothing, nor did they hear the sound of horses’
hoofs. They were permitted to have their books and papers; despite
the fact that Vanzetti had written a statement in which he had called
Governor Fuller a “murderer.” They wrote farewell letters to the world:
still cherishing the “messianic delusion,” the idea that posterity
would be interested in their sufferings.
XVII
All that day the lawyers rushed about, and the Governor was busy
with his advisers. His Council was in session, also the seven
ex-attorney-generals of the Commonwealth, invited to advise him as to
the law on the matter of a respite. On the street outside, several
squads of pickets were being dragged off to jail, with more or less
violence. Those who had been arrested the day before were being denied
their hearings in police-court, and condemned to pay fines without
argument. Some refused, and went to jail; others paid, and came out to
join the “death march” again.
Marvelous copy for the newspapers, which printed everybody’s guesses
as to what was going to happen; every detail about the police
preparations, and diagrams of the death-house, and photographs of
the electric chair, and of the executioner--a gentleman who made a
specialty of sending two thousand volts of electricity into living
human bodies; he came from New York, it appeared, and was paid by the
piece. For this job he was to get seven hundred and fifty dollars, and
shocking as the statement may sound, he was overcharging the great
Commonwealth. The people of Massachusetts, having elected their best
business man to attend to their affairs, surely had a right to expect
the discounts customary to the trade; but here was New York State
getting its killings done by the same killer for only one hundred and
fifty per!
Young Musmanno went to see his clients, to get another paper signed.
They were glad to have some one to remind them that human affection
still survived in a world given up to business. Sacco refused to sign,
as usual; Vanzetti signed, hoping it would help both of them. He was
reading the Beards on “The Rise of American Civilization”--at the same
time that he watched its fall. He was not going to be able to finish
these large, expensive volumes, so he wanted to give them to the young
lawyer as a token of regard. But Musmanno couldn’t bear to take them,
because it would be admitting that Vanzetti was to die that night. They
had quite an argument about it; and several times Sacco would break in
with his realist humor: “Take the books, Musmanno! Take the books!”
Musmanno did not take the books, but sped away to make another plea to
the Governor. The prisoners began to sing; there was no law to prevent
that, they sang every international song they knew, in Italian and in
English.
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation;
A newer world’s in birth!
The rest of the prison heard no sound; but the searchlights flashed
into their cells and kept them awake, and cries would run down the
tiers of cells--hundreds of men shouting over and over: “Let them out!
Let them out!” There was no one to interfere with them, for the guards,
many of them, broke down and sobbed.
A singular adventure of Dorothy Parker, young poet from New York,
sophisticated and ironical, but not liking official murder. She knew a
newspaper reporter, and he got drunk, and volunteered to take her into
the prison with him. He got her past the police-lines, and then went
to get another drink, and never appeared again. So there was Dorothy,
wandering about, patting the noses of state troopers’ horses, surveying
the lines of guns, and testing Massachusetts prison discipline after
bed-time. She sat with the reporters, and gathered the news, and
then went to the telephone and called up Sacco-Vanzetti defense
headquarters, and was overheard by a horrified deputy-warden--a spy
of the enemy inside the defenses! A lovely story for bored reporters,
smoking cigarettes and playing cards in the officers’ club, and begging
for the tiniest item of news to put on the wires--starting with the
mystic letters, “SV,” and ending with the promise: “Will be add.”
What was the supersalesman doing? Said Betty, “It is his idea of drama,
to make publicity for himself!” But in this she was blinded by her
hatred of the man. The plain truth was, he had decided to have the
execution that night, and get it over with. But some of his advisers
said it was impossible, with matters as they stood before the courts.
Arthur Hill was arguing--a three hour argument before the Council. Up
to the last half hour the issue hung in the balance, and swayed, now
this way and now that.
Every preparation for death was made; the canvas cover was off the
electric chair, and the current tested--the three victims listening to
the sounds. They were dressed in their death-clothes--shirts with short
sleeves and trousers with short legs, leaving room for the electrodes.
But at ten-twenty the warden came to the reporters, his face wreathed
in smiles, announcing that he had been notified by the Governor, the
execution was “off” for that night. Wild excitement, and some joy, for
the burly warden did not like his job the least bit. The reporters
flashed the word “reprieve” to the farthest ends of the earth; but five
minutes later the warden came in again, his face a blank--terribly
sorry, he had further word from the Governor, the execution was “on”
again, and was to take place at midnight.
The official witnesses who had been selected, and the one reporter, the
Associated Press man, who had been favored above all other reporters,
made ready to enter the death-house. But again the warden burst in, at
twenty-seven minutes past eleven, almost in a state of collapse--he had
had another talk with the Governor, and the execution was “off” for the