Boston a novel
Judge Thayer’s examination; they were limited in questioning Katzmann.
Worse than that--they don’t even know the names of all the witnesses.
I understand that Mr. Lowell is saying that he had ‘confidential
information.’ He is telling that to all his friends; and what place
have secret whispers in a fair trial? You say that the trial before
Judge Thayer was fair--yet the Lowell report admits that Judge Thayer
committed ‘a grave breach of official decorum.’”
“That was after the trial, Mrs. Thornwell.”
“It was while he still had the various motions before him. He was
still the judge of the case, and the sole judge, right up to the time
he pronounced sentence last April, and automatically excluded any
other judge from acting. Are not men entitled to have new evidence
considered before an unprejudiced judge? And who else has considered
that evidence?”
“I have, Mrs. Thornwell; and I think that I have common sense, even if
I haven’t legal training.”
“Pardon me, Governor, but we have suffered much from inability to get
you to consider new evidence. We brought you the express receipt for
eels, but we are told that you say you know Vanzetti never got them.
We bring you the Pinkerton reports, but we don’t know if you know
what is in them. They cancel Mary Splaine, but you still go on citing
Mary Splaine. We bring you the son of Lola Andrews, and he tells you
that his mother is not to be trusted, but you go on trusting her.
You tell Musmanno that you don’t believe Vanzetti ever sold fish, and
Musmanno brings you an affidavit from Carbone, the wholesaler from whom
Vanzetti bought fish in Plymouth regularly. We bring you all sorts of
affidavits, but nothing does the least good, because you have some
secret information that we are not permitted to know about, and that
determines the whole matter for you. What is it, Governor--tell us now,
instead of too late. Believe me, the world is going to know some day!”
Thus the little old white-haired woman; and with elaborate and patient
courtesy the sorely tried statesman assured her that she had fallen
victim to the machinations of dangerous and depraved persons. He had
the duty of deciding this case, not she; and when he made promises to
witnesses in fear of their lives, he would keep those promises. When
she broke down and wept, and Mrs. Henderson began to plead for mercy,
he said that Massachusetts was in the grip of a crime wave, and that to
pardon guilty men would set a dangerous precedent. He had refused to
pardon the “car-barn bandits,” even though they were native Americans,
one of them a World War veteran. No, he was not troubled by the clamor
from outside, the pleadings of what people said were “great minds”;
they might be great in their own line, but they didn’t know about the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. This clamor would pass quickly. When Cornelia
started to argue against capital punishment, his answer was: “You and I
both sleep better in a state which has capital punishment.”
Cornelia gazed at him, with a look of dismay. She could not reply to
such words. Men had killed their fellows for fear and for hate, for
piety and for glory, for exercise, for sport, for food; but here for
the first time in recorded history they killed for a soporific! The
little old woman stood up, trembling.
“Governor Fuller, answer me this: What are you going to do when we find
the real criminals? Somewhere in the world are two men who really did
the Bridgewater job; somewhere are four, or five, who did the South
Braintree job. And rest assured, we are going to find them--we are
never going to rest until we have found them--and then, how will you be
able to face life? What will all you gentlemen do--judges and governors
and college presidents--knowing that you sent two innocent men to
their death? What will there be in the world for you--but insanity or
suicide?”
He did not answer, and she went out, with despair plainly written
upon her aged face, for all the newspapermen to see and record. In
the corridor they told her the news, right hot off the wire--Arthur
Hill had telephoned to his office, Justice Stone had turned down his
request. The lawyer was up in Maine, and could not get back to Boston
until morning, so his work was at an end.
What had Mrs. Thornwell to say to that? What was she going to do? The
reporters gathered about, eager for more story. A marvelous melodrama
this was to them--a whole day packed full of thrills! Melodrama at
the State House, with millionaires and blue-bloods and “headliners”
of all sorts in a fourteen-hour stream! All over the city, with two
hundred persons arrested, and tens of thousands looking on; with poets
and hoboes, “Reds” and “scions of wealth,” famous lawyers and judges,
playing their lively parts! All over the world, with bombs exploding
and plate glass shattering, mobs yelling and cavalry charging! And
at the end death waiting, in the aspect of a chair with widespread,
capacious arms, gaping for its victims! Monday, August 22nd, 1927, a
date never to be forgotten in the history of the world!
CHAPTER XXIII
THE LAST ENEMY
I
In a room in the Hotel Bellevue, adjoining the State House, five
lawyers from New York, all volunteers in the case, had worked all
Sunday night and part of Monday, eighteen consecutive hours, concocting
legal formulas and having them typed. On the roof of the hotel were
detectives, and in the windows of the State House opposite; for the
spectacle of lights burning all night in a room known to be occupied by
Reds exercised an irresistible spell upon the authorities. “What are
they doing now? Where are they going?” Half a dozen automobiles waited
outside the hotel, and whenever one of the lawyers took a taxi, the
august Commonwealth of Massachusetts trailed behind.
Now the Boston lawyers had failed, and admitted their failure; the New
York lawyers had the field, with seven or eight hours to go. They asked
for a hearing before Federal Judge Lowell, and he set the hour of six
o’clock. A court session consisting of one judge, five lawyers, and a
score of newspapermen. The judge resented the intrusion of “foreigners”
into this case, and took occasion to say what all ruling-class Boston
was thinking. He accused the strangers of “trying the case in the
newspapers”; he interrupted them again and again to demand “law, not
eloquence.” When William Schuyler Jackson, ex-Attorney General of
New York State, was showing the conspiracy carried on by Katzmann to
deceive the jury at the Dedham trial, the judge broke in: “Did you ever
see a Norfolk county farmer?” The lawyer, disconcerted, had to admit,
“Not in reality.” Whereupon the judge snapped out: “Well, if you had,
you’d have a better opinion of that jury.”
It made magnificent copy for the newspapers; the _Herald_ put it in a
“box”--“Judge Lowell Praises Norfolk County Farmers”--and all patriots
swelled with pride. Wonderful beings were Norfolk county farmers, and
wonderful also the Lowells, who spoke only to Cabots, who spoke to
God. It was the hard luck of the ex-Attorney General of New York State
that he was not familiar with the details of the case; otherwise he
might have made answer to the arrogant judge: “The Sacco-Vanzetti jury
consisted of two real estate men, two machinists, a grocer, a mason,
a stockkeeper, a clothing salesman, a mill operative, a shoemaker, a
lastmaker, and _one_ Norfolk county farmer!”
The lawyers loaded themselves into an automobile, together with Isaac
Don Levine, journalist, and set out for Beverly, to make a last appeal
to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Detectives trailed behind them, and
more detectives met them at their destination. The very old gentleman
sat in his parlor, talking with two very old ladies; a chaste New
England home, everything antique, in the taste of a bygone age. The
lawyers presented their petition, and the judge sat himself down
to peruse it--four thousand words of “law, not eloquence.” A dead
silence; and Levine sat in the hall, listening to the ticking of a
“grandfather’s clock.” “Life-death, life-death, life-death,” it said;
the listener shivered.
The old gentleman looked up. “I appreciate the general force of your
argument,” he said--and their hearts leaped. He was famous for the
so-called “judicial mind,” his ability to consider legal principles
in a vacuum completely freed of human emotion. He went on: “I am of
the opinion that the petition is covered by the principles stated
in my decisions upon the former applications for habeas corpus and
certiorari, and therefore I am compelled to deny the writ.”
The lawyers excused themselves, and got into the car again, and whirled
back to Boston. One more hope; Federal Judge Anderson, who was not
quite so free from human emotion. Seven years back, he had condemned
the Red raids in an exhaustive and scorching decision. Now he was
attending the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, two hundred
miles away, and Tom O’Connor had arranged at the East Boston naval
airport to charter an airplane to take John Finerty, a leading lawyer
of Washington, formerly assistant counsel for the U. S. Railroad
Commission. It would be a risky journey at night, but they had worked
for eighteen hours over those four thousand words of “law, not
eloquence,” and wanted to make it count if they could.
The nearest landing field was in Albany, New York, fifty miles from
Williamstown. O’Connor had arranged with a taxi company to have a cab
waiting at the landing field. All was ready; but alas, some one tipped
off the authorities at the airport as to who these nefarious persons
were, and a naval officer ordered them off the premises. “It would give
me pleasure to shoot you,” he said to the ex-Attorney General of New
York State; and next day the newspapers reported that the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts has been asked to put a special guard over the
airport, threatened with seizure by the Reds!
II
From a window of the Hod Carriers’ Union in Salem Street, Ella Reeve
Bloor was explaining the case as an episode in the class struggle to
a crowd of some hundreds of solemn-faced workers. “Mother” Bloor,
they called her; sixty-five years old, she had raised a brood of five
children, and turned them loose in the radical movement, and so was
free to wander over America, wherever workingmen on strike called for
a martyr. A little round jolly figure, full of laughter, brown as a
hickory nut and as solid, she said her say, until the policemen forced
their way into the union headquarters and dragged her out. “Inciting to
riot,” was the charge.
At the same time Paula Holladay was getting arrested in her red
“slicker” again; they took it away from her this time! Over near
Charlestown prison another group were preparing to walk into the den of
blue-coated lions; their leader was Helen Peabody, one of those “with a
background,” who conceived it her duty to be in jail when the execution
took place. In an obscure hall near defense headquarters, Betty and Joe
were speaking to a somber crowd. It would not save Sacco and Vanzetti,
but it would save their message, as Joe pointed out. Let the workers
learn, and organize to defend themselves against ruling class murder.
A curious instance, then going on, to illustrate Joe’s message.
Everywhere in Boston the workers had been dragged to jail for
attempting to voice their protest; but in the town of Peabody, some
twenty miles away from Boston, there was now going on a meeting in
the public square, at which ten thousand workers were voicing their
feelings unmolested. How came that? Quite simple; the workers of
Peabody had taken the precaution to elect themselves a Socialist mayor.
Yesterday, Sunday, the chief of police had broken up a mass meeting,
in the regulation Mike Crowley style; the mayor had been on vacation,