Boston a novel
next twelve days. The reporters leaped to the telegraph-keys--having
before their minds a terrible calamity. There are newspapers in the big
cities which make a practice of printing descriptions of things which
haven’t happened, but are due to happen according to schedule; there
would be New York papers having on their presses the news that the men
were dead. Suppose some of these copies were to get onto the streets!
The “false execution”--such was the name by which the friends of the
defense came to know that dreadful evening. They had sat in defense
headquarters, and in a church behind the State House which had been
mercifully opened to them, and waited for news, and pictured the worst.
Rosina Sacco had sat for three hours holding a watch in her hand; when
at last the news of the reprieve came in, she collapsed, and had to be
carried to the home of friends. In the little apartment on the north
side of Beacon Hill, Cornelia Thornwell was at the telephone, dizzy,
but able to hear the voice of Deborah: “I told you, Mother! You should
have believed me--he would not dare to disregard us.”
CHAPTER XXI
DAYS OF GRACE
I
Sacco and Vanzetti, brought up from Dedham jail on the first day of
July, had been put into the death cells. When the Governor granted the
first reprieve of thirty days, to allow the Lowell Commission to work,
they had been moved back to what was called the Cherry Hill section of
the prison. On the first of August, it being ten days to the new date
of execution, they went back into the death cells. Now, the Governor
having granted twelve days more, the rules required another return to
the Cherry Hill section. “Oh, this is wearisome!” exclaimed Sacco.
“This moving!”
He was on the twenty-sixth day of a fast, and barely able to totter.
But he would not be assisted; no, he would take care of himself. A
slow, feeble procession, the guards at his side ready to catch him
if he fell. Vanzetti walked behind; having broken his fast, he had
a little strength. Out into the open sunshine in the prison yard; a
glimpse of the flower-beds along the walk, of blue sky overhead, white
clouds, and gray and white gulls wheeling; the sounds of freight cars
being shunted in the Boston and Maine yards, on the other side of the
prison walls. A few steps to be climbed; wait, let him alone, Nick
would do it by himself. At last he was lying on his cot in the new
cell; tortured, distracted--when his wife and son came to see him they
found his mind wandering. He was in what is known as a “blind” cell,
having a solid wooden door in front of the barred iron door, and a
peep-hole through which the keepers could look in.
Vanzetti also was in such a cell, and had fits of frenzied protest
against the long drawn out and senseless agony. He talked aloud at
night, and disturbed the other prisoners. His words being mostly in
Italian, the guards and reporters said they were “incoherent.” He
shouted about “the machine, the machine!”--which they took to mean the
electric chair; not understanding the social system which is crushing
human hopes throughout the world, grinding up the souls and minds of
millions. Vanzetti was told that his cries were keeping other men
awake, and that if he kept it up, he would be put in the padded cell,
known as the “Blue Room.” At this he became furious, and dragged his
cot and wooden bureau in front of the door of his cell, and warned the
guards that they would not get him out alive.
Cornelia heard that news, and came to the prison early in the morning.
They had refused her admission to the death-cells--only relatives and
attorneys were allowed there, a strict rule. Now they told her that
Vanzetti was “dangerous,” but she laughed at them; Bart had never been
dangerous to those who used the methods and the language of love. She
told them that she could tame this wild man for them, and without
padded cells or strait-jackets. Since they dreaded a scandal very
much, they gave way and took her through the prison yard, and into the
corridor of “blind” cells.
Poor Bart--a dreadful change from the early days in that prison, when
he had been so eager to see her, yet made her wait while he washed
the coal dust from his face and hands! And always carefully shaved,
clear-eyed, and with his unconscious natural dignity. Now he lay in a
dark hole, feeble and wasted, his hair falling out, his teeth decaying,
a gray and wasted specter. He started up when he heard her gentle
voice, but then had to sink back on the cot, for he grew dizzy if he
got up suddenly.
Cornelia asked the guard to let him come out into the corridor and
sit with her. She knew that he would be gentle. The prisoner answered
that of course he would; but he was not fit to be seen. She promised
not to look at him, and so he came, and she looked into his eyes, and
smiled and began to talk. She had been to Plymouth a few days ago, to
interview a witness for Musmanno; she had seen the Brinis, and had
much news about the family. They had moved to a place on Cherry Court,
and the baby was grown up. A hundred items of gossip--even the latest
reports from Vincenzo’s garden, and the explosion which had occurred in
his home-made wine!
And then news about that most precious of young creatures, Rupert
Alvin Thornwell Randall--a mouthful of names. He was a sturdy one;
two years old now, toddling and talking at a great rate; spending the
summer at his grandmother’s country place on the North Shore, while
his mother gave her time to the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. Betty had
been so determined that this infant should grow up in a proletarian
environment--but alas, it was midsummer, and hot in a little apartment,
and out there on the North Shore were cool, refreshing breezes; so
the grandparents had the precious one, completely surrounded by a
battalion of servants, and all the demoralizing uses of luxury. Betty
had to choose between saving one infant and saving the world--a dilemma
frequently encountered by reformers. Cornelia told Bart a little about
the family duel, which had been going on for two years; now the great
banker and his wife had got their way. Bart said they always would, so
long as they were able to control the things which other persons needed.
Vanzetti had been writing off and on, in spite of handicaps. He had
a statement which he wanted Cornelia to revise; she might assure
the warden that there was nothing in it like calling the Governor a
“murderer,” which had made such a terrible scandal throughout all
Massachusetts. He wanted to give her a lot of his manuscripts to
keep--but she didn’t want to take them, because that would be admitting
that he was going to die! In the course of their talk he developed
signs of timidity, and said he had written something that he had wanted
to show to her, but he was afraid maybe it wasn’t very good; it was a
poem--a poem about a nightingale! Cornelia reassured him--it wouldn’t
need to be very good in order for her to be interested in it. He drew
it from the lot of papers, and read it to her: this “dangerous” one,
sitting in the corridor of the “blind” cells, with a lynx-eyed guard
watching every move and listening to every word. The poem began:
_When in the course of endless cosmic changes,
Upon the close of winter dark and drear
From far away, benignant, crowned with roses,
We see the lovely, longed-for spring appear...._
Cornelia had to tell the poet that such emotions had been expressed
before; nevertheless, there were tears to her eyes over the effort
of a wop in prison to describe a nightingale in Italy! Springtime
in Villafalletto--the fruit trees in blossom and the vegetables
thriving--and the poet behind bars, condemned to death! Was it because
of her aching pity for the doomed idealist, or was there really beauty
and pathos in the closing lines?
_Thus in my garden, in bright morning’s glow,
I saw thee in an April long ago._
II
Twelve days of grace had been granted to the defense. Twelve days in
which to educate the world! Twelve days for lawyers to compose more
briefs, packed full of legal formulas and imposing citations; to hop
into automobiles or airplanes, and go hunting for judges, and argue,
plead, insist--there could not be a total failure of law, when new
evidence had been discovered, proving that innocent men were about to
be executed. The judges would listen politely and patiently; but in all
that long list, from the lowest to the highest, not one would think
about anything but precedent, not one would act upon a basis of mercy
or justice, political wisdom or ordinary common sense.
“Unless a million men can be mobilized in our defense, we are lost!”
Such had been Vanzetti’s statement, two or three years ago. It had
taken the United States government a year to mobilize a million men,
and the Sacco-Vanzetti committee now set out to do it in twelve days.
They drafted appeals and sent long telegrams--a great sum in tolls each
day. Mass meetings were held in hundreds of American cities and towns,
and in all the capitals of the world; the newspapers were full of
reports of riots and strikes. But such events only stiffened the backs
of the State House crowd; this was “Bolshevism,” and the answer to it
was several thousand rifles with bayonets, and a plentiful supply of
gas bombs and machine guns.
The one thing the State House crowd really feared was a general strike.
That was the weapon which had saved the lives of Ettor and Giovannitti,
and which might have saved Sacco and Vanzetti. The police were on the
alert day and night for the first move towards it. Two Jews, officers
of the cap makers’ union, started a movement for a strike among the
clothing workers of Boston, and were arrested and framed on a bombing
charge. The police hadn’t the slightest thing on them, and confessed
it with a laugh when they released them--after the execution. There
were spies everywhere, bringing word, hour by hour, of what was going
on in all the centers of sedition. The ruling classes waited for the
least little sign of violence, the least departure from the rôle of
martyrdom--so odious and exasperating to those who believe in gold and
steel.
The “highbrow” sympathizers labored to mobilize liberal opinion. They
organized emergency groups and drafted appeals to the Governor, and
collected signatures from leaders of every form of intellectual and
artistic activity. It was a simple matter to get such persons to voice
their horror at the idea of executing men after seven years on the
rack, and when there were so many reasons for doubting their guilt. The
trouble was that after the signatures were collected, there was nothing
to do with them--except to take them to the State House, and turn them
over to a man who read the _Saturday Evening Post_, and to whom a list
of leaders of international thought was of less significance than a
list of the delegates to an “ad-men’s” convention.
This salesman of motor cars posed as being completely impartial, and
delighted to assure his visitors, “I don’t know what an anarchist is,
I don’t pay any attention to that sort of stuff.” But right in the
midst of these pretenses some researcher in Washington dug up his
hate-speeches--the only ones of any consequence he had made during his
four years’ service in Congress. He had been an ardent advocate of
the exclusion of Victor Berger, the socialist congressman, and with
hot anger had called for “the crucifixion of disloyalty, the nailing
of sedition to the cross of free government, where the whole brood of
anarchists, bolsheviks, I.W.W.’s and revolutionaries may see and read
a solemn warning.” He had talked about the “red scum,” and the “agents
of the red flag,” and had denounced opposition to preparedness as “a