Boston a novel
devilish scheme of undermining the morale of the people.” These tirades
had been delivered just before a thousand men and women were dragged
from their homes and thrown into Boston jails.
III
Not since the days of the Civil War had there been such a test of
the consciences of men and women in Boston. Strange things happened,
unexpected workings of the spirit. To Cornelia Thornwell in her little
apartment came the second son of James Scatterbridge, known as “James’s
Josiah,” and sat in a chair and fixed his pale blue, earnest eyes upon
her, and in a timid, half-apologetic voice began, “Grandmother, it
seems to me as if I ought to do something to help.”
“There is plenty to be done,” said the old lady.
“I decided I ought to contribute some money, so I went to defense
headquarters yesterday evening. I had made up my mind to give half
my vacation allowance. But while I was there three Italian laborers
came in; you could see they had just come from the day’s work, their
shoes were covered with mortar, and the backs of their hands had big
knotted veins on them. They brought more than fifty dollars which they
had collected on the job. I couldn’t understand what they said, but I
watched their faces, and I realized it was money which their wives and
children must need, so I got ashamed of myself. I think we all have too
easy a time. I gave every cent I had, and now I don’t know what I’ll
do.”
“Lots of college boys go to work in vacation time, Josiah, and
sometimes they learn more than in classes.”
“I know, Grandmother, and that’s what I’ll do; but first it seemed to
me that I oughtn’t to let you and Betty and Joe carry the brunt of all
this. Betty says she’s going to get arrested next Sunday, and it seems
to me I ought to go, too. What do you think?”
Another family problem! Cornelia declined to solve it; she said that in
matters of conscience, every person has to act for himself. “It will
make your father very angry, of course.”
“I know; he’s terrible when he gets excited about the Reds. But I don’t
think it’s quite the same as being a Red, to say that men ought not to
be executed when there is so much doubt of their guilt. But I can’t get
Father to see that at all. You’ll be shocked, I know, but he said they
ought to be executed, anyhow.”
“I’ve heard many people say that, Josiah; it is almost a respectable
opinion in Boston. A member of the Governor’s Council has voiced it, I
am told.”
“We’re having a funny time at home right now,” continued the youth.
“Have you heard about Great-uncle Abner? He is determined to break into
the _Transcript_ with a letter about the case, and Father has promised
Uncle Henry that he won’t let him--out of respect for you, of course.”
“I know,” said Cornelia. “It is very kind of them.”
“Father is provoked with you, but he won’t have any scandal, and he
has been having all the servants bring Great-uncle Abner’s letters to
him, instead of posting them. Great-uncle Abner found out about it,
and there was a terrible row, you could hear him shouting all over
the house: ‘Am I in jail or am I not in jail? Answer me that? Have I
been legally committed? If not, take me out of here, and let me die
a free man!’ He just wouldn’t give up, and Father had to pacify him,
for fear he’d have another stroke. What Father did--you won’t believe
it--he promised to send the letter to the _Transcript_, and he had a
printer take the editorial page from an early edition, and reproduce it
complete, with the page on the other side also--but with Great-uncle
Abner’s letter in it. It was quite wonderful--it would have fooled
anybody. They put it in the evening edition and brought it to the old
gentleman, and he was as pleased as punch--read it about twenty times,
and some of his old friends were let in on the secret, and came to
see him and patted him on the back and said it was a great letter and
ought to settle the case with the Governor. It said there ought to be a
Bolshevik hanging from each tree on the Common, and they ought not to
have any trials. It said that American institutions must be saved from
rape at the hands of Russian gold and Italian dynamite. It was almost
as bad as some of the letters that really get published!”
IV
The case worked also upon the consciences of persons who were cursed
with artistic temperaments. Such unfortunates read the letters of
Vanzetti and recognized a brother in distress. He who had made himself
a master of English prose spoke to all other writers, now as in times
to come. They gathered from far and near, anxious that a great soul and
a prophet should be recognized before he was dead.
There came Arturo Giovannitti, compatriot and fellow-victim of the
“frame-up” system: one of those whom Captain Proctor had set out to
“get,” in the days of Proctor’s prime, before his conscience began to
trouble him. For more than a year Giovannitti had lain in Salem jail,
and had written a haunting poem, “The Walker.”
_One-two-three-four: four paces and the wall;
One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate._
Now he walked a somewhat longer road in front of the State
House with the golden dome; measured, not by paces, but by
minutes--one-two-three-four-five-six-seven. He went to the Common,
temple of free speech with elm-tree limbs for arches. “Fellow-workers,”
he began--being an I.W.W., that was his formula. “Break it up!” shouted
“Mickey the Gunman.” “You’ve said enough!” But the poet protested:
“I haven’t said anything yet! Wait till I finish before you arrest
any one.” “You’re talking against the courts!” was the answer of the
superintendent of police. “You’re not allowed to talk against the
courts!” The mounted troopers drove their reluctant horses into the
crowd. “Break it up! Move along there!”
John Dos Passos came, playwright and novelist, genial, gentle, and
bold as a young bull buffalo. A graduate of Harvard, he came to save
the honor of his alma mater. “You have put your name and indirectly
the name of the university to an infamous document”--so he wrote to
President Lowell; and then, since no Boston paper would publish his
letter, he went out on the picket-line and exposed his head to the
policemen’s clubs, and his skin to the vermin in the old Joy Street
police-station.
“Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng!” There thronged George
L. Teeple, of the class of ’97, and got himself arrested with the other
pickets, and read a statement in court, paying fifteen dollars extra
for the privilege, because the judge remarked that there might be an
excuse for ignorant foreigners, but there was very little excuse for a
Harvard man to violate the law.
Also Powers Hapgood, nephew of Norman and of Hutchins. His was not the
sort of head the Boston police were used to breaking. He had completed
four years’ work at Harvard in three; he had “made” the Dickey and
the Hasty Pudding Club, the varsity track squad and the Harvard
“Crimson.” He had been in the service abroad, and was one of the few
undergraduates honored by election to the Harvard Memorial Society.
He was one of those young Americans in whom readers of fiction refuse
to believe; “unreal and made to order,” they say, of a college youth
who travels over the country working in coal mines, and becoming a
leader of the left wing miners. Now he came to express his opinion of
President Lowell, and the opinion was such that official Boston shut it
up in the Psychopathic Hospital.
Heywood Broun was carrying on the same fight in New York, as
“colyumist” of the _World_, at a salary of four hundred and fifty
dollars a week. Broun had been “flunked out” of Harvard in his youth,
and this may have made him feel disrespectful. “From now on,” he
wrote, “will the institution of learning at Cambridge which we once
called Harvard be known as Hangman’s House?” The _World_ published
that, but refused to publish the next articles, so the “colyumnist”
went on a “permanent strike,” which made an enormous sensation among
the literati. An extraordinary thing, the way the case “got” the
intelligentsia, even that portion which prides itself most upon being
hard-boiled and immune to social emotions.
V
Also there came alumni of the University of Hard Knocks. Those foreign
names which pleased the readers of Boston newspapers so little belonged
to clothing-workers who had given up their jobs, and spent their
savings to come and jeopardize their skulls; to sailors from the port,
to iron-workers, barbers, bakers and waiters; also to poets and writers
who had educated themselves, and thus could understand the soul of
Vanzetti. There came Michael Gold, a young Jew from the slums of New
York, who had been a newspaper reporter in Boston when not yet out of
his teens, and had been one of that group of anarchist sympathizers
whom Cornelia had seen, eleven years ago, accompanying Galleani to the
Plymouth cordage strike.
Mike was now a playwright and editor of the _New Masses_, but resented
being classified as an “intellectual,” and wanted to remain a worker;
so he dressed in khaki, which gave a shock to Boston. He wandered
about, fascinated by the spectacle of a city gone mad with fear. He
listened to the conversation of sleek clerks and stock-brokers of
State Street, ex-football players of Harvard who wished they might
have a chance to tackle the “Reds.” He listened to taxi-drivers and
soda-jerkers, who knew what they had read in a capitalist newspaper, or
learned from others who had read it in some other capitalist newspaper.
On the afternoon of the “false execution” he joined the “death march”
in front of the State House, and the same two iron-handed cops who
grabbed Dorothy Parker the poet grabbed Mike Gold the playwright, and
hauled them away to the oddly-named Joy Street police station. “Hang
them! Hang the anarchists!” cried the straw-hatted mob; and Mike,
who had written a life of John Brown, saw the ghost of William Lloyd
Garrison going down the street with a rope about his waist, followed by
the “mob in broadcloth,” crying “Hang him! Hang the abolitionist!”
Those Boston merchants of a hundred years ago had been, some of
them, the “bootleggers” of their day; smuggling “black ivory” from
Africa, Negro slaves whose labor would be turned into molasses in
Louisiana. The molasses would be brought to New England and made into
rum, and the rum would go back to Africa, to make drunk the savage
chiefs whose war-victims would compose the next bootleg cargo. Now
the great-great-grandsons of those old merchants bore the same names,
and looked so much like their ancestors that when they came up for
election to the Somerset Club, the directors thought they were voting
for the ancestors. These great-great-grandsons had imported hundreds
of thousands of white niggers from the Mediterranean and Baltic lands,
to operate their steam and electric machines, and had built a colossal
system for the exploiting of this new slave labor. These new masters
considered themselves civilized, and were willing to install “welfare
work,” and have their wives “do charity.” But at the same time they
looked upon these foreign hordes with mingled contempt and fear, and
dreaded the day when they might refuse obedience. To suggest this to
them was the worst crime that could be committed in modern New England;
the “black abolitionists” of 1831 had been replaced, as objects of
ruling class hatred, by the “red scum” of 1927.
So it was that Boston was under what amounted to martial law, and there
were more detectives watching strangers than there were strangers.
Any one who wore a beard, or had a dark face, was liable to be halted
on the street and ordered to give an account of himself. A messenger
carrying a box of seidlitz powders had to stop for a chemical analysis.