Boston a novel
father was like:
“‘It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that
I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a
neat little farm and learn all your sincere words and tender affection.
Then in the summer time to be sitting with you in the home nest under
an oak tree shade, beginning to teach you of life and how to read and
write, to see you running, laughing, crying, and singing through the
little verdant fields picking the wild flowers here and there from
one tree to another and from the clear vivid stream to your mother’s
embrace. The same I have wished and loved to see for other poor girls
and their brothers, happy with their mother and father, as I dreamed
for us. But it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes has
saddened very badly your father’s soul. The men of this dying old
society brutally have pulled me away from the embrace of your brother
and your poor mother. But in spite of all, the free spirit of your
father’s faith survives.’”
XI
On Monday morning, the last day, Governor Fuller came to his office
in the State House at half past ten o’clock; rosy and smiling,
greeting the newspapermen: “Good morning, boys; a fine day. I’ll be
here at my desk until midnight, boys, doing my duty.” Already there
were deputations waiting for him, lawyers from New York, editors,
writers, labor leaders, society women--he would see them all, in
batches, all day long; he would greet them with his marble smile,
listen with politeness, and say: “I will take what you have said under
consideration.”
Some came to urge him on the other side; including the newly elected
officers of the American Legion, which was holding a convention in
the State House that morning. Returned soldiers who hadn’t had enough
of war, they were keen for this as for all other killings. They were
singing the “Star-spangled Banner” at noon, when the first group of
pickets began their march on the street outside.
All day long the pickets would come, one batch after another, ten or
twenty at a time, with their placards of polite protest, all bad words
barred. They would walk their appointed number of paces, and then the
police would close about them, and take them in tow, and march them
to Joy Street, and then--“Files right!”--to the police-station. The
men were packed, eight into a cell, and the women in the guard-room,
waiting for their bail.
There were well-known names among them. Edna St. Vincent Millay, from
Rockland, Maine, home of her ancestors for many generations. Loveliest
of women poets, she would find this a devastating experience; life
would not seem the same after a rendezvous with murder. “My personal
physical freedom, my power to go in and out when I choose, my personal
life even, is no longer quite so important to me as it once was.... The
physical world, and that once was all in all to me, has at moments such
as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me
comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer make up to me for all
the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.”
John Dos Passos again, and John Howard Lawson; also Clarina Michelson,
and Paula Holladay--still with her red slicker. And Paxton
Hibben--still with his speech. Alfred Baker Lewis of the Socialist
Party, Harry Canter for the communists, and Margaret Hatfield, who
might be taken as representing the Republicans, since her father
was county treasurer. Professor Ellen Hayes of Wellesley College,
seventy-six years of age, marching with a cane, and holding her head
up high--the most serious hour of a scholar’s life! A picturesque
figure she made, in a Norfolk jacket and skirt, square-toed shoes, a
little flat hat, and white hair bobbed to her shoulders; bright, eager
eyes and sensitive face, now grim--the New England conscience working.
“What is your occupation?” asked the clerk. “Professor of astronomy and
applied mathematics.” They did not book these very often!
Others to uphold the honor of “Old Boston”: Catharine Huntington, who
lived on Pinckney Street, with ancestry going back three hundred years
in New England; Helen Peabody, and Helen Todd, suffrage workers; Lola
Ridge, the poet--all these New England born, with forefathers on the
_Mayflower_, or the _Fortune_, the second-best boat. This was true of
Edna Millay, of Margaret Hatfield and of Dos Passos. The committee had
sent out a call for everybody “with a background”--the polite Boston
phrase. Nothing would count so much with the newspapers; the humble
Jews and Italians and Slavs--Frishman and Pogrebisky, Chiplovitz and
Chasanovitz, Pulcini and Magliocca and Spognodi--these must be content
to have their names listed wrong. “What is fame?” say the British army
officers. “To die in battle, and have your name misspelled in the
_Gazette_.”
Betty and Joe had their chance now; the police were taking them as
they came, blue-bloods and all; so near the end, they no longer
worried about public opinion; it would all be over to-night, things
would settle down, the dead wops would stay dead. Over in the office
of the Boston _Herald_, on Tremont Street, they were putting into
type an editorial, kissing the case good-by. A year ago they had been
heroically demanding justice, and winning a prize for it; now what
they wanted was “Normalcy.” “Back to Normalcy! The asperities which
have attended the Sacco-Vanzetti case in its long and tedious journey
through the courts are greatly to be regretted, and should be forgotten
as quickly as possible. Let us get back to business and the ordinary
concerns of life, in the confident belief that the agencies of law have
performed their duties with fairness as well as justice.... The chapter
is closed. The die is cast. The arrow has flown. The voice of the
department store advertising agent has been heard in the office of the
_Herald_.”--They did not publish that last sentence, of course. That
was the truth.
XII
Betty and Joe marshaled all the others, and then joined the last
contingent, a group of needle-trade workers, risking their jobs to go
to jail. The little party came into Beacon Street, and saw a mob of
thousands on the side adjoining the Common. The great iron gates in
front of the State House were closed and chained. The policemen were an
army, the reporters and photographers and plainclothesmen were another.
The pickets were accused of obstructing the sidewalk, but really it was
these others who did it.
The little group exposed their signs and began to walk. The cops closed
round them, not much formality or delay; the guardians of order were
tired, and the seven-minute provision got scant attention. The pickets
were told to disperse, and when they walked on, paying no attention,
they were shoved against the railing and closed in. “Christ, my arm!”
screamed a Jewish boy, not yet out of his teens.
“What are you doing?” cried Betty, to the policeman. “You don’t have to
twist his arm like that!”
“Shut up, you bitch!” was the answer.
“I don’t have to! I’ll take your number, and make it hot for you, if
you don’t let up on that boy!”
“Shut your trap, and go back where you came from!”
“I came from Commonwealth Avenue, and my father is Rupert Alvin,
president of the Pilgrim National Bank of Boston.”
“Holy Jesus!” said the pious cop, and stopped his torture.
The reporters came running; a story for the last afternoon editions.
“Have you anything to say, Miss Alvin?”
“Yes, I have a whole speech to make, but your papers won’t print it.”
“Give us a try!”
“Well, I’ll say that the men we are murdering to-night will have a
statue in front of the State House before you and I die. I’ll say there
are two judges whose names will be linked together in history--Pontius
Pilate and Webster Thayer.” Thus Betty, trembling with rage, the white
and pink in her lovely cheeks coming and going like Northern lights in
the sky.
“Come on, Miss,” said the scared cop; and Betty walked down the street,
remarking, “My husband is back there--Joe Randall; he’s got a statement
written out.”
So the reporters went to Joe, who gave them a copy of a cablegram he
had sent that day, in answer to one from Pierre Leon in Paris: “Tell
the workers of the world that the way to punish Boston for this crime
is to repudiate the debts. Cancel every dollar owed to America, both
publicly and privately. When the first nation does that, Boston will be
sorry it committed murder. When the second nation does it, Boston will
take steps to bring Sacco and Vanzetti back to life.” Needless to say,
that did not appear in any Boston newspaper!
The old Joy Street police station, so oddly named. The main room
crowded with tired and disgusted-looking policemen, and young ladies
from sheltered homes, getting their first lessons in profanity. “Take
these god-dam bastards to number nine.” “Take them bitches to the
detention room.” “What the hell we going to do with this new bunch?”
There were more than a hundred and fifty in all, and the old place
had been built before the program of “loitering for liberty” had been
thought of. The walls shook with cheering, and waves of revolutionary
song:
_Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!_
Outside in the crowd there were Reds who joined in. Boston was
honeycombed with sedition, so the patriotic societies declared.
The women sat on the benches lined against the wall. They spread
newspapers, for the place was in a state of filth not to be described
in print; the walls against which you wanted to lean were covered with
dark smears, the blood of that creature which Vanzetti termed the
“bed-buck.” If a woman asked for a toilet, she was taken to a place
of filth in an open cell among the men. If she asked for a drink, she
was pointed to a faucet with a dipper so dirty that she would not take
it in her hand. If she complained, the word would be, “Why don’t you
go back to Rooshia?” When your time came to be bailed out, you put up
two dollars extra for the bailer; graft in Boston had become a system,
a vested right. You could even have got a drink of the best liquor,
confiscated from the unlicensed bootleggers, if you had looked like the
right sort, and had the price. But you could not get the windows of
this hellhole opened--not unless everybody would agree to stop singing
Bolshevik songs.
XIII
Mary Donovan came, with bail for Powers Hapgood. He was to be her
husband before long, and she had reason to be concerned about him
now, for he had won special enmity. This was his fourth arrest. After
the Sunday demonstration, a fortnight ago, the police had come with
a warrant and arrested him again upon the more serious charge of
“inciting to riot.” “A bare-headed youth leading women into danger,”
said the police sergeant in court, and the judge said, “Six months.”
Powers was nowhere to be found, and there was great alarm. For several
hours nobody could find out what had become of him; then came a
“tip”--he was in the “Psychopathic.” That had been the bright idea of
the captain of the state police. The shortest time in which anybody
could get through the “Psychopathic” mill was ten days; and meantime
Boston would be “back to normalcy.” It was all for the prisoner’s good,
to keep him out of danger, said the police; the most considerate lot of
sluggers that ever filled their stomachs with bootleg whisky and their
pockets with bootleg graft.
A weird experience for a member of the Dickey and the Hasty Pudding
Club and the Harvard Memorial Society! He was a handsome, athletic
young fellow, but he looked less impressive after they had stripped him
of his clothes, and put him in a dirty bathrobe. They took him to one
of the wards, and put him in the very bed in which Sacco had once lain!