Boston a novel
wrote it to the amount of eight hundred million dollars, and didn’t
have to pay one cent! A net profit of a cool million to the companies,
and a corresponding loss to Boston merchants. Preposterous that two
wops should cause such trouble! The newspapers, which thrive upon
department-store advertising, made one sweet harmony: “Stand by the
Governor and the courts.” In the profession, Boston was known as “the
poor-house of journalism.”
II
Cornelia, splashing around frantically for a straw to catch hold of,
bethought herself of Cardinal O’Connell. Luigia Vanzetti was a faithful
daughter of the church, and a pitiful figure; perhaps she might be
able to tempt the great man into making an appeal for clemency. So
Jessica Henderson came with her limousine, always there to help the
Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and they drove the anxious, fearful little
woman out to the summer home of the great prelate at Marblehead. He was
on the lawn with his dog when the party arrived, and Mrs. Henderson’s
daughter went to ask if he would see Luigia. “Bless her heart, of
course,” he said.
He was cordial, charming, as he knew how to be when it was worth while.
He served tea himself, and remarked to Cornelia, “It may be a long time
before you have a cardinal pouring tea for you again.” He chatted with
Luigia in Italian, and Cornelia could understand enough to know that he
was sympathizing greatly, and doing nothing. Afterwards he wrote and
gave to the papers a statement on the subject which was a masterpiece
of diplomatic piety: “Human judgment is fallible at best.... But the
judgment of God is perfect and in the end He and His ways, mysterious
as they are, are our hope and salvation.” Said the sarcastic Betty:
“Now we know why God was invented--so that princes of the church may
dodge their moral responsibilities!”
Futile to try to make headway in Boston, with the weight of such
authority against you! The local liberals were hamstrung by the Lowell
report. If Mr. Lowell said it, it must be so, and who are we to set
ourselves up against him? Likewise Bishop Lawrence had clambered onto
the bandwagon. Having asked the Governor to appoint an impartial
commission, he now accepted the impartial decision, and commended the
Governor for his firmness and courage. He did this in a letter, which
appeared in the press.
There they stood, the three intellectual and spiritual guides of
Boston: the Cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Bishop
of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the President of Harvard
University. When a stranger inquired concerning them, he was struck by
a curious fact: the first statement about any one of the three would
be that he was an efficient administrator of enormous properties. This
was not his fault, of course; the properties were there, and must be
administered; but the automatic effect was this, that if you were to go
to any one of the three administrators, and make a remark suggesting
that he should act upon the creed he taught, he would begin to watch
you to see whether you were the dangerous kind.
The Cardinal of the Catholics was exiling rebellious spirits to the
backwoods, and raising up a generation of young clerics who were at
once preachers, politicians, and real estate experts; you could know
when one of them was in favor by the fact that his mother and father,
brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, moved immediately into
expensive residences. As for the Bishop of the Blue-bloods, he had a
father who helped to finance John Brown’s expedition to fight slavery
in Kansas; the son was known as the best money-raiser in New England,
and had turned his vast organization into a school of social propriety.
When it was a question of a blue-blood church official accused of
undue intimacy with choir-boys, you would see this well-bred bishop
as anxious to have the law not enforced as he was to have it enforced
against anarchist wops.
As for President Lowell, he would boast that every professor in his
great institution enjoyed complete freedom of speech, and when some one
asked him how he could manage anything so dangerous, he would smile and
say that it was easy if you were careful whom you allowed to become a
professor. When it chanced that a Harvard lecturer dared to attack the
electric light and power interests, whose directors and bankers compose
the governing body of the university, President Lowell would “fire”
him, and incidentally lie to him, with exactly the same heartiness as a
“wop” standing by a friend accused of banditry, or a blue-blood banker
trying to save fifteen million dollars.
III
Bugles in the streets; a regiment of the state militia marching,
with grim set faces--the answer of the Commonwealth to the challenge
of anarchy. Airplanes flying overhead, watching for bombers in the
sky. Military squads on duty at every public building, suspicious of
every foreign face, and now and then stopping a passerby to search a
bundle or open a suitcase. Every policeman on twenty-four hour duty
again; sitting in the station-houses, and now and then called out
for a wild ride or a gallop, on account of a bomb-scare. The firemen
also on twenty-four hour duty, and all armed. The American Legion
mobilized to guard the homes of the rich and the great. Every judge,
juror, prosecutor, witness, or official who had ever had anything to
do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case was being protected, and there was no
foolishness about the protection.
A man hopped out of an automobile at the home of President Lowell,
and started towards the rear entrance, carrying a heavy black bag.
They did not stop to ask him who he was or what he wanted, they hit
him over the head and laid him out--and then ascertained that he was
delivering a load of that heavy aluminum ware which is the latest fad
in fancy cookery for the rich. A young Catholic priest stepped off
the train in South Station, arriving from the west for a holiday; he
went to the information bureau and said, “Will you please tell me the
way to the State House?” “Certainly,” replied the clerk, and called a
policeman, saying, “This man wants to know the way to the State House.”
The kind-hearted policeman said he would escort him, and led him to a
patrol-wagon, and drove him to the nearest station-house, where they
held him “incommunicado” for twenty-four hours.
The great Commonwealth had told ten thousand lies; and now for every
lie there was a club and a bayonet. If you wished to oppose the lies,
there was just one way--put your head under the crashing clubs, throw
your body onto the gleaming bayonets. This was not merely the law of
Massachusetts, this was the law of life, the way by which lies have
been killed throughout history. The friends of the defense confronted
this crisis, and either went forward and took the punishment, or shrunk
back and sneaked away with a whole skin and a damaged conscience.
Terrible scenes in the Thornwell family. In “Hillview,” Great-uncle
Abner storming, because the Governor had been browbeaten once, and
might yield again; Abner declared that he would wheel himself all
the way to Boston, thirty miles or so on the public highway, and
present himself at the Governor’s office to demand the death of the
two anarchists. On the other hand, in the tenement on the north side
of Beacon Hill was Deborah pleading and praying to her daughter, not
to throw away her life, not to disgrace herself and her innocent and
helpless family.
Cornelia was not going to get arrested; she was motoring with Mrs.
Henderson to make an appeal to Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court.
But Betty had pledged herself to carry a placard on the Common, and
Joe also. They had sent out a call for a thousand demonstrators, and at
least two were going to respond. Nothing that Deborah could say would
have any effect; no tears, no prayers. “They are surely going to arrest
me once,” said Betty, and laughed, a trifle hysterically. “They are not
going to murder Bart and Nick without arresting me at least once!” When
Deborah brought in the sacred names of little Rupert Alvin Thornwell
Randall, the unnatural mother made reply: “The best thing that could
happen to him would be for me and Joe to be clubbed to death, so that
you and Father could raise him to be respectable!”
That was late Saturday night, after the meeting in Scenic Auditorium.
Deborah stayed in town that night, and telephoned to Rupert, who gave
up a service in his new private chapel, the joy of his life, to come
and add the immense weight of his authority. But Betty did not even
wait to see him; she went off to a gathering of the “New York nuts,”
who were making cardboard signs to wear while undergoing martyrdom.
Her Uncle James Scatterbridge came upon her in the lobby of the Hotel
Bellevue--most fashionable of hostelries, adjoining the State House,
where a group of the leisure class “nuts” had made their headquarters,
to the great dismay of the management.
Uncle James came there, with blood in his eye, looking for his Josiah,
intending to take him captive by force if necessary. But James’s Josiah
was hiding, and when his father actually found him, he was walking on
the outskirts of the Common, with a policeman holding each arm, and a
jeering crowd all around. James pushed his way through and took charge,
to the relief of the “cops,” who had been told to make as few arrests
as possible. There followed painful hours for both father and son; but
do not worry too much, for it will turn out happily in the end--the
great cotton-master will be able to keep his son’s name out of the
papers, and also be able to make his Josiah into a mildly successful
young business man. They will look back on this adventure some day,
and the older will be secretly rather proud of the younger’s nerve. “A
damned fool, of course; but then, we’re all damned fools when we’re
young.”
IV
Boston Common is an irregularly shaped park, comprising, with the
Public Gardens, about a square mile. It is laid out with rambling
paths, and has a Monument Hill, with cannon and other trophies; there
are greenswards, groups of trees, a band-stand with benches, the
“Frog Pond,” and in the Public Gardens a little lake for boats. The
State House with the golden dome overlooks it from one corner; the
Park Street Church, the Union Club, and many of the homes of the old
families on Beacon Street. On the other side is Tremont Street, with
the fashionable shops; and from the end of the Public Gardens starts
Commonwealth Avenue, where the Alvins lived. All very fashionable, in
a dignified way, mixed up with history and tradition, taking itself
seriously. In the old days, this Common had been the place where the
villagers pastured their cows; now it was a place for nursemaids to
flirt with sailors from the ships, and for out-of-works to study the
“help wanted” ads in the newspapers. On Sunday afternoons all the
religious cranks, the holy rollers and the Salvation Army, shouted
under the trees along the mall; also the atheists and the socialists
and the single taxers, and those who refuse to believe that the earth
is round.
But this Sunday, August 21st, all that was off, and for a year to
come. There was a band concert and a radio concert to keep the
crowds occupied; also two ball-games, and two impromptu dog-fights.
Twenty-five thousand people came--having read in the papers that some
new-style martyrs were going to feed themselves to the lions.
One thousand had been called for, and fourteen came. The lawyers were
in part responsible for that, having strenuously urged against it. The
demonstrators would be sure to get their heads clubbed, and could only
do harm to the case by cheap notoriety. Those who were troubled by
the former consideration were glad to have the latter for an excuse.