Boston a novel
moved him back into the death cells for the third time. “Oh, this
is wearisome!” He lay, very weak, his mind unsteady. He could only
say, “I can’t understand it. They will kill us?” Vanzetti was sunk in
melancholy, and would say nothing except, “My sister! My sister!”
Luigia Vanzetti landed in New York that day; a quiet, thin, sad-faced
little woman in a faded brown traveling cloak, coming second class,
her name kept off the passenger list of the great liner. A strange
fate to have befallen a simple woman of an Italian village; in Paris
she had been set to march at the head of a huge parade of workers.
Now, bewildered by throngs coming to greet her, and by urgent young
newspapermen of this strange land of hustle and sensation, she clutched
a gold medallion of the Madonna in her hand; relying upon this ancient
magic to save her unhappy brother, whom she had not seen for nineteen
years. She hoped to convert him, she said; “I will ask him to see a
priest, and return to the faith of his childhood, of those happy days
before he left us.” Felicani and Rosina Sacco had come to meet her, and
persuaded her to soft-pedal that aspect of her mission. As it turned
out, she was no more able to save her brother’s soul than she was to
save his life.
XII
Henry Cabot Winters had to postpone important legal conferences, worth
at least a thousand dollars a day to him, to come and comfort his
distracted mother-in-law; to argue with her, explain to her--or just
listen to her. “Yes, I know, Mother, it seems very wrong that new
evidence cannot be considered; my judgment is, the Supreme Court won’t
stand by that ruling very long--they’ll reverse it, or the law will be
changed. But this time they must have it. You see, this Sacco-Vanzetti
evidence is not real evidence to them--it’s just more wops telling the
same old lies, and every one is tired of it.”
“Too tired to consider the good of our courts, Henry!”
“It’s just the other way to them, Mother--they think they are standing
by the courts. You must realize the dilemma; how can they throw Web
down?”
“It would seem to me that Web has thrown them down.”
“Web has been a vulgarian, of course. But after all, what he said is
what everybody thinks; and he’s been game, you have to admit that--he
had a nasty job, and he stuck to it like a little soldier. For seven
years he’s risked being shot or dynamited every hour of his life; and
now, to repudiate him--it can’t be thought of.”
“Couldn’t they find some other ground to grant a new trial?”
“It’s all very well to talk about new trials as a matter of propaganda;
but if you mean it seriously, stop and think. With this agitation
and uproar--how could there be a trial? You couldn’t get a jury in a
hundred years. Look at what happened to those people in East Milton!
Think of the witnesses--appearing and testifying, with dynamite
exploding all around them!”
“We wouldn’t need dynamite for those witnesses, Henry; with what we
know about them to-day, there isn’t one who would dare take the stand.”
“All right, grant that is true--where does it leave us? It comes to
this, the Commonwealth has had two Reds within a few minutes of the
electric chair, and now has to admit that it has no real evidence, the
whole thing blows up. We might just as well hand our courts over to the
Bolsheviks and be done with it. We’d never be able to convict another
one.”
“So, Henry, you are going to send two innocent men to death, because it
would be embarrassing to admit a blunder!”
The lawyer smiled patiently. “Don’t get to believing your rhetoric, and
putting it off on me, Mother! You asked me what is in the minds of the
Supreme Court, and I am telling you. When I talk to lawyers about it,
and bring them to admit that maybe the evidence is weak, that is the
argument they end up with--the courts must be sustained.”
“A brand new idea of justice, Henry!”
The other smiled again. “On the contrary, an idea as old as courts
themselves.” He cited the pronouncement of some fine old Tory judge to
a too-urgent plaintiff: “It were better that you be ruined, than that
the law be changed for the likes of you!” Henry was no legal scholar;
but because he lived in Boston, it was necessary for him to possess
some handy learning, for public purposes. He told his mother-in-law
that this pungent saying went back even farther; it was in Law-French,
which is a barbarous combination of old Norman-French with bastard
Latin. He wrote it out, in an effort to divert the poor soul’s mind
for a few moments. “Que est ceo a nous? Il est mieulx qu’il soit tout
defait, que la ley soit chaunge pur luy.”
XIII
Cornelia insisted that she had to see the Governor once more, to plead
with him for mercy. Even granting the worst, these men had been on the
rack for seven years, and surely that was punishment! Henry said that
would not get her very far; Fuller was a Roman senator, he believed
in a life for a life. He had not pardoned a single man during his
two terms as governor, and he had shortened only one sentence. But
Cornelia, being a very old lady, was entitled under the Boston law to
have her way; so Henry called up and made an appointment for her the
next morning, and promised to come take her.
A great crowd in front of the State House, more picketing having been
announced. Policemen so plentiful, they could have touched hands all
the way along the front of the great building. Much scrutiny of those
who came into the building--but Cornelia and Henry being obviously of
the ruling caste, the guards took one glance and passed them on. Crowds
of people in the corridors outside the executive chambers, reporters
hungry as a shoal of fish; but etiquette of course forbade the old lady
and her escort to talk to them. They were escorted into an inner office
to wait.
The Governor’s time was given up entirely to the hearing of pleas.
People came in groups, every sort--lawyers, clergymen, social workers,
labor leaders, writers--he saw them, and took pleasure in putting to
each lot his string of “posers”: Did you attend the trials? Have you
read the record? Have you talked with the witnesses? Then what do you
know about the case? When they set out to tell what they knew, he would
not always listen. Said Arthur Garfield Hays, attorney from New York:
“I wish to talk to you about the Department of Justice files.” Said the
Governor: “Who wrote that editorial in the _World_?”
Cornelia was escorted to her seat in the torture-chair, and the
automatic smile and the cold agate eyes were fixed upon her. Other
eyes also: Mr. Joseph Wiggin, the Governor’s personal attorney, and
Attorney-General Reading, and another lawyer. They never left him alone
now, there must be witnesses to every word he said, and expert football
players to employ what was known as “interference”--jumping in and
protecting him, to keep him from revealing his ignorance about the case.
It was as Henry had said--he was a Roman senator, and did not want to
talk about mercy. He wanted to pin this old lady down, and vent his
exasperation at the trouble she had caused him. He did not say in so
many words that she was to blame for all the lunatics carrying placards
outside on the street, but that was the meaning of his attitude.
Since his decision had been announced, he no longer had to pose as
open-minded; he might be the bitter advocate, asking questions, and
not paying any attention to her answers. “If Vanzetti was an innocent
man, why didn’t he take the stand at Plymouth? Why leave his alibi to a
twelve-year-old boy?”
“He produced eighteen alibi witnesses, Governor, and he could have got
more if his lawyers had worked. We have found a dozen since.”
“If Sacco and Vanzetti were good men as you say, why were they intimate
with a man like Boda?”
“But what have you against Boda, Governor?”
“I have sources of information, Mrs. Thornwell.”
“Boda was brought into the trial, and even Judge Thayer had to throw
him out. They dragged in all that tale about the Coacci shed, and about
Boda’s little Overland car--on purpose to make the jury think they had
a bandit-gang--”
“I don’t understand you, Mrs. Thornwell; there is nothing in the record
about Boda’s Overland car.”
“Why, Governor, of course it is there! I heard it in court, and I have
read it a hundred times.”
“You are mistaken, I am certain.” It was a great man speaking. “Wiggin,
is there anything in the record about Boda’s Overland car?”
“Nothing, Governor, that I have ever seen.”
What could Cornelia say? She could challenge him, of course, demand the
record, and show him; or she could offer to send him the citation in a
couple of hours. But what effect would it have, except to annoy him?
Several persons had had this same experience, and had told her about
it. Three times in the course of a brief interview, Cornelia would have
to let him make incorrect assertions about the record. She must be
tactful, and try to keep him smiling; for he was a man, and a Roman,
and he did not like women butting in, arguing, correcting. Woman’s
place was the home!
XIV
The salesman of motor-cars rested upon the authority of greater minds
than his own. “Mrs. Thornwell, I appointed a commission to investigate
this case, and I assure you, if a single one of those gentlemen had
thought there was a doubt of the men’s guilt, I would not have taken
this stand. But here you have three impartial referees--”
“Judge Grant had expressed a belief in their guilt before you appointed
him, Governor.”
“I have heard that gossip, but you should not repeat such a thing
unless you know it to be true.”
“But Judge Grant has written his opinion of Italians--he practically
called them a nation of pickpockets.”
“Where do you get that? I never heard such a tale!”
“I have the book upon my table at home, Governor, and I will send it to
you if you wish.”
But what he wished was to change the subject quickly. “I have had
witnesses coming to this room for two months--person after person,
assuring me of their identifications--”
“But Governor, even Judge Thayer had to throw out the identification
testimony before he got through with this case!”
“What do you mean--throw it out?”
“I thought you had studied Judge Thayer’s decisions. In his 1924
decision he said: ‘These verdicts did not rest, in my judgment, upon
the testimony of the eye-witnesses.’”
“What did he say they rested upon?”
“Upon the consciousness of guilt.” So then the Governor hastened to
talk about the consciousness of guilt. Sacco and Vanzetti had lied when
they were arrested, and they had lied on the stand, and their lies were
manifest and had been exposed, so that no sensible person would dispute
them.
“Granting your argument, Governor--”
“So you are prepared to admit that there was perjury in the case?”
“I am trying to find out where the argument leads us. If both sides
made up testimony--and certainly we know that there was a great deal of
it on the side of the prosecution--”
“I don’t know anything of the sort, Mrs. Thornwell.”
“You must know that Erastus Corning Whitney perjured himself.”
“Erastus what? I never heard of any such witness. Do you know of any
such, Wiggin?”
Cornelia broke in. “Pardon me, Governor, I was not setting a trap for
you. Erastus Corning Whitney is the real name of the man who took the
stand and swore that his name was Carlos E. Goodridge, and thereby
manifestly perjured himself. So, as I say, if we assume perjury on both
sides--”
“Then we can say that one cancels the other.”
“Pardon me if I point out the fallacy, Governor. To begin with, the
prosecution has to establish a case. When you wipe out the witnesses
of the prosecution, one by one, as we have done by our new evidence,
there is no case left, and under the law the men are innocent--quite