Boston a novel
“So it is coming to pass that some justices repel our appeal
because they are friendly with us, and other justices repel our
appeal because they are hostile to us, and through this elegant
_Forche Caudine_ we are led straight to the electric chair.”
These nine elderly gentlemen who did the real governing of the United
States were overworked, and in dread of taking more upon their bowed
shoulders. They had the task of telling the American people what laws
they might pass and what laws they might not pass; what their laws
meant, or ought to mean; in short, what served the propertied classes,
and what threatened them. An enormous task; and the old gentlemen
contemplated with dismay the idea of opening the sluice-gates and
letting in more work upon themselves.
They dealt with the law, they said, and never with the facts. But
when there came an emergency where it seemed necessary to deal with
facts, they would find a way to do it. The Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts had just shown that in the Jerry Walker case, where
the jury had decided the facts against the interest of the fellow
club-members of the Court. The Court had stepped in and considered such
facts as they pleased, and like all special pleaders they had stated
the facts on their own side, and suppressed the facts on the other
side. But in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti there were no vast sums of
money at stake--only the lives of two wops. “It were better that you be
ruined than that the law be changed for the likes of you!”
VIII
Cornelia came back to her apartment on Sunday evening, beaten and
exhausted. Betty was over at defense headquarters, helping to organize
the new arrivals and plan the last demonstration. Poets, writers,
artists--all persons, old and young, with an urge to martyrdom--were
pouring into Boston, and in front of the State House they would have
their chance. Betty was lame from her effort to upset a horse, but was
sticking to her desk; she had not been to bed the night before, and was
not going to-night. “Plenty of time to sleep after Monday midnight,”
she said. “Bart and Nick will keep us company.”
Joe was at the headquarters of the new “Citizens’ National Committee,”
which was concentrating its efforts upon trying to persuade the Federal
authorities to accept their responsibility in the case. The committee
was sending and receiving hundreds of telegrams every day: obtaining
signatures to a petition to the President of the United States, asking
him to intervene, according to the precedent set by Woodrow Wilson,
when the State of California had been on the point of executing Tom
Mooney. But there was an important difference between the two cases;
Mooney was an A. F. of L. man, and labor had to be handled gingerly in
war-time. But now there was what capitalism calls “peace,” and Sacco
and Vanzetti had no standing in the court of power-politics.
The President of the United States was that “Cautious Cal,” whom we
saw shot up on the Massachusetts escalator. “Keep cool with Coolidge,”
had been the slogan which had got him the greatest vote ever given to
a wizard of prosperity. Now the wizard was keeping himself cool upon a
high mountain peak in Yellowstone Park. He knew the way to do nothing,
and do it more systematically, than any man who had ever held the
office. He had as much idea of dipping his fingers into that boiling
Boston caldron as he had of spending his vacation in the mountains of
the moon. Hundreds of dollars were spent collecting signatures to a
petition, and thousands were spent by individuals telegraphing direct.
The messages came by the basketful, and served to start the evening
fires for a chilly and frugal New Englander.
Musmanno was at Hill’s office, trying for a long-distance telephone
connection with Chief Justice Taft. This elder statesman was in Canada,
where he could not legally sign a writ; it was Musmanno’s idea that
he might come to the border, and there at least hear a petition. The
young lawyer had an airplane ready, and would start that Sunday night.
He sat at the telephone from seven in the evening until four the next
morning, but the great jurist was able to find some perfectly good
legal reason for staying where he was.
IX
Deborah was in the apartment, waiting for her mother, to plead with her
not to kill herself in this dreadful crisis. Cornelia was hardly able
to get up the stairs without help; yet unwilling to go to the Alvin
home, where there was an elevator. She could not sleep; she must lie
on the bed, with the telephone receiver to her lips, asking for news.
She would sink back, and Deborah would think she was resting--but no,
she was getting ready to call Mr. Moors, to see if he could not induce
Mr. Lowell to induce the Governor to grant a few more days! She was
appealing to Hubert Herring, a young Congregational clergyman who had
risked his job, getting a dozen other clergymen to sign an appeal to
the Governor!
Mother and daughter shouted to each other across an abyss, and just
now the abyss was full of thunder, and it was hard for voices to get
across. “Mother! Mother!”--Cornelia heard a faint cry--“You think more
about two Italian anarchists than you do about any member of your own
family!”
“My dear”--Cornelia shouting back--“no one is planning to murder any
member of my family.”
Deborah would take a sentence and meditate over it, until an answer
became so urgent in her bosom that she would try once more. “Mother,
there are other kinds of unhappiness, almost as bad as being murdered.”
“My child, that is God, trying to break the hard shell of your pride.”
Cornelia phoned to Arthur Hill’s office. His daughter-in-law was in
charge of the phone, and would tell her if there was any more news.
There was none, and Cornelia hung up, and sat staring before her
with a face of torment. Deborah’s heart ached, but the only way she
could help was to diminish her mother’s interest in those dreadful
Italians! “Mother, Henry has become positive that both those men were
dynamiters.” And again: “Mother, I believe you really prefer dynamiters
to law-abiding people!”
Make allowances for Cornelia. These family disputes, that go on for
years and years and never get anywhere, are hard upon the nerves. Said
the mother: “I prefer the dynamiter who cares about justice to the most
law-abiding person in the world who doesn’t!”
The telephone rang; Deborah’s older daughter, Priscilla, asking if
she might come round. This had been one of Deborah’s schemes--her
daughter would keep Cornelia’s mind occupied with news about the
great-grandchildren. But Priscilla had better not mention that her
mother had suggested the visit. Deborah was forever devising such
little plots--always, of course, for the other person’s good; and she
had trained her older daughter to coöperate.
Cornelia began asking about the wife of Governor Fuller--what sort
of woman was she? It seemed that Jessica Henderson and Cornelia were
planning to motor up to Rye Beach, New Hampshire, the next day, and
implore the help of this much-troubled lady. Deborah told what she had
been able to judge from one dinner-party. Mrs. Fuller was a Catholic;
and Cornelia asked, what would that mean? Could she possibly be made
to understand that Jesus was to be electrocuted in Boston to-morrow
midnight?
So Deborah burst out again: “Mother, do you think Jesus ever used
dynamite?”
“No, my dear, it wasn’t invented in those days. All he had was a whip,
to drive the moneychangers out of Trinity Church.” And after Deborah
had expatiated upon the extreme charitableness of Trinity Church, her
mother shocked her by exclaiming: “Oh, Boston, Boston, thou that givest
the prophets a ride in the patrol-wagon!”
X
Priscilla came, a tall and distinguished young matron now; but she
did not get any chance to tell the news about her three children. She
found the poor old woman lying back on her pillow with her eyes closed,
speaking in whispers which might have come from a death-bed. She took
Priscilla’s hand, and said, “I talk to your mother, and it means
nothing to her. Let me try the next generation!”
“Yes, Grandmother,” said Priscilla, obediently. “What is it?”
“Your mother cannot understand how anarchists come to be in Boston.
So I try to explain to her. When I was a young married woman, about
your age, I used to look out of our back windows and see pitiful
children of the poor, going about in winter-time with ragged shawls
over their shoulders and holes in their shoes, rooting in the frozen
garbage in alleys behind the Back Bay homes. I was told that it was
the will of God, so I did nothing. But now I have discovered that it
is a social system. All those miles of slum tenements down in the
South End, falling into ruins, with filth and litter in the alleys and
mangy cats prowling--that hideousness which is the underside of our
proud and pious city--that is not God, that is blue-blood old ladies
and gentlemen holding acres and acres of land, inherited from their
great-grandfathers, and letting the tenements fall into ruins while
they wait for an increase in land values which they do nothing to
produce. Is that so hard to understand, Priscilla?”
“No, Grandmother.”
“Well, that is one detail out of a hundred. Your husband owns millions,
because he was allowed to inherit a mountain of copper, which he did
nothing to earn, and which others manage and work for him. You will
inherit millions because your father is allowed to manufacture the
credit of the country and keep it for his own use--no, Deborah, don’t
argue with me, for I know you haven’t studied our banking system, even
though you are a banker’s wife. Mr. Lowell is a multi-millionaire
because he is allowed to exploit the labor of thousands of slaves
in cotton-mills--even though he never tended a spindle or managed a
factory in his life. Governor Fuller is the richest of all of us,
because he is allowed to sit like a robber baron of the Middle Ages,
and fine everybody a thousand dollars for the privilege of driving a
Packard car in New England. He talks about bandits, and really thinks
they should all be executed! All of us sit on top of our privileges,
and haven’t the least idea of getting off; we use all the powers of
society to seduce or destroy those who resist us--if necessary, we kill
them for a crime, whether they committed it or not.”
There were many questions that Priscilla would have liked to ask, and
many objections that her mother would have liked to register. But both
of them were frightened, thinking that Cornelia might gasp out her
life on that bed. So they sat silent, with distress in their eyes; and
presently the poor soul was whispering again:
“My children, I have followed this case for seven years, and here is
what I know about it, a frightful thing to say--from first to last
there has not been one honest man who had anything to do with it on the
government side: not a single one, from the policemen who lied on the
witness-stand to your three blue-blood commissioners who doctored the
record--every man has been seeking a pretext to carry out his will upon
two fanatics whom he considers dangerous. That is the truth about the
Sacco-Vanzetti case; and there lie those two men in the death-house,
one of them a self-taught philosopher, a man of genius who has managed
under the pressure of affliction to make himself into the most
beautiful character I have ever known in my years on this earth--”
There came tears from the wrinkled old eyelids. “Sacco, too!” she
exclaimed. “A man with the heart of a child!” She put out her hand and
took some papers from the lamp-stand by her bed, and began turning
them over. “Listen; he is writing to Inez, his six-year-old daughter;
a letter which the child may have in after years, to tell her what her