Boston a novel
Angeles, Buenos Ayres or Paris or Tokio--they had figured the time, and
were saying the same words as Cornelia Thornwell: “They must be doing
it now! They must have them in the chair! How long does the current
take?” And one and all they noticed that extraordinary phenomenon--time
stood still, minutes refused to pass as they normally should.
The telephone ringing; Betty had to let go of her grandmother’s hands
to take the receiver. Cornelia watched her face, reading the fates
there. No need to hear a word; Cornelia knew it was Joe, and he was
saying, “It’s all over.” “Yes, sweetheart,” said Betty, in a voice as
even as if she were accepting an invitation for lunch. “Yes, we’re
all right. Grannie went over and had a talk with them both, and she’s
feeling stronger. But you’d better come home right away--yes, dear, we
might need you. Please do.” She hung up quickly, so that Joe might not
hear the dreadful burst of anguish from the poor old woman on the bed.
Betty dug under the wasted body, and got hold of the hands, and made
the agonized soul sit up and look at her. “Grannie, listen to me now!
You don’t realize--it’s all over! Stop and think what that means--Bart
and Nick can’t suffer any more! Nobody can punish them, nobody can
torture them--ever again! They aren’t in jail! They are free!”
So on and on, until the idea did actually penetrate Cornelia’s mind.
The sobbing ceased, and she sat staring ahead of her, as if at an
apparition in the room. “It is really so! They can’t do any more to
them!”
“Grannie, blessed dear, it is what Nick has been saying all along, and
we never had sense enough to realize it! Their job is done, and they
are all right!”
V
At ten o’clock the chief electrician and his assistant had tested
the death chair and pronounced everything in order. Then came the
executioner, to make his inspection. Elliot was this gentleman’s name;
he preferred a retired life, on account of anarchist bombs, but the
clamor of newspapers had brought him into the limelight; they published
his picture, and a list of the human beings he had killed. The “false
execution” of twelve days ago had compelled him to make a journey for
nothing; very annoying, and he was hoping that now there would be no
hitch, he would get his seven hundred and fifty dollars.
Father Murphy came to the death cells, to make his last offer of
eternal life. Absolutely without charge, and merely by a few passes of
the hands and the speaking of a few words, he was willing to deliver
these three men from the otherwise certain fate of perpetual roasting
upon a brimstone and sulphur fire. Nearly three hundred years ago
the philosopher Pascal had presented an unanswerable argument on the
subject: the procedure would do you great good if it were valid, and
no harm if it were not valid. But Vanzetti answered that it would do
harm to those whom he left on earth, to be more tightly riveted in
the chains of superstition. So, a few minutes before midnight, Father
Murphy went to the officers’ club of the prison and remarked to the
newspapermen, “There seems to be nothing for me to do, so I am going
home.”
That clubroom was like the “pit” in the stock exchange, with more
than a hundred reporters scrambling for every scrap of news. Many
telephones were installed, and eighteen telegraphers sat at eighteen
machines, to feed the curiosity of a ravenous world. The service
included direct cable connections with all the other five continents.
The representative of the Associated Press had been honored by an
invitation to witness the execution, and was pledged to furnish the
details to his colleagues.
There were, according to law, a number of official witnesses, whose
duty it was to certify to the Governor that his orders had been
carried out. They were in readiness, and the warden now led them to
the death-house. Chairs were lined against the wall of the execution
chamber, facing the electric chair, and the worthies took their seats.
The big warden, with plump round face and little black mustache and
narrow slits for eyes; a well-known Boston surgeon; the physician of
the prison; the surgeon general of the national guard, who looked
like a college professor; the medical examiner of Suffolk County, who
looked like a romantic poet with tousled hair; the sheriff of Norfolk
County, a bald-headed, stern-faced old Puritan, who had had Sacco in
charge for seven years, and Vanzetti off and on, at great expense to
his office--he was one of those who had expressed their sentiment
by piling up the desk of Judge Thayer with flowers, on the day that
learned jurist delivered his charge to the Dedham jury, and explained
the nobility of loyalty.
There was a telephone against the wall of the execution chamber, and
the representative of the Associated Press took his stand by it; the
wire ran to the warden’s office, and from there a telegraph operator
would relay every word to the crowd of reporters. In this way they
would learn when each man entered the death chamber, when the current
was turned on, and when the death was officially announced. Later the
“A.P. man” would go over to the officers’ club and give the details.
The executioner stood behind a screen in one corner, to the left of
the death chair; he could look over the screen, and see when it was
time for him to earn his money. Two guards stood by the door leading
to the cell corridor, and when the warden signaled that all was ready,
they stepped back to the first cell, and unlocked the door. Madeiros
lay asleep--not setting much value upon his last moments. The guards
awakened him, stood him on his feet, and led him, half dazed, into the
execution chamber, closing the door behind them, out of kindness for
the occupants of the other two cells.
The victim had on short gray trousers, with a slit cut up each leg,
and a blue shirt with short sleeves, made especially for the occasion.
He was seated in the chair, and as quickly as possible the deputy
warden and a guard buckled the straps which would hold his hands and
feet immovable. The electrodes, from which the current was to enter
the body, were fastened, one to each leg, and a third, the headpiece,
covering the entire top of the head; they contained wet sponges, to
afford perfect transmission.
They tied a bandage over the victim’s eyes, and then stepped back; all
was ready. It was the warden’s part to signal with his hand to the
executioner, who would then move a switch. Since this did the actual
killing, the theory was that the executioner alone was responsible, and
for carrying this heavy responsibility the Commonwealth paid him the
sum of two hundred and fifty dollars for each of three motions of the
hand--plus traveling expenses from his retreat in New York.
He made the first motion, and there was a whir of the current, and
the body of Madeiros gave a sudden leap, which would have jerked it
from the chair if it had not been that the straps were heavy. Human
flesh became of the rigidity of steel, and stayed that way for several
minutes, with a current of nineteen hundred volts passing through it. A
ghastly odor of burning hair spread through the death chamber.
The current was turned off, the body sank back limp into the chair,
and the warden signed to the medical examiners, who stepped forward
with their stethoscopes. At nine minutes and thirty-five seconds past
midnight they pronounced the Wrentham bank robber dead, and the body
was lifted from the chair and carried to one of three newly painted
slabs hidden behind a screen in the death chamber. Nothing could exceed
the sense of propriety of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or
the decency with which it prepared for the elimination of its enemies.
VI
The door leading to the cells was opened again, and the two guards went
in to the second cell. Nicola Sacco was not asleep, but waiting, to do
his last duty as a revolutionist. He walked out between the guards;
he entered the execution chamber, and looked about him at the row of
solemn witnesses, the deputies, the chair, and the screen with the face
peering over it. His own face was white and haggard, his lips set, his
whole expression that of defiance. He walked directly to the chair and
sat down; then, as the guards began to adjust the straps, he lifted
himself slightly, raised his voice, and said, in what came as a shout
in that still brick-walled chamber of death: “Viva l’anarchia!”
(“You see!” said all Massachusetts, when they read about it with their
morning coffee and codfish balls. “We told you so! We knew it all
along!”)
The guards paid no attention to any words. They went on with swift
fingers, as if they feared that some one might come to stop them at
the last moment. When they were through, and stepped back, Sacco opened
his lips again, and the warden withheld the signal. “Farewell, my wife
and children and all my friends!” Then, as the warden was in the act of
lifting his hand: “Good evening, gentlemen. Farewell, Mother.”
The cue was given, and the executioner moved the switch, and the body
leaped so that it was like a blow against the straps. Twenty-one
hundred volts was the executioner’s estimate of what it would take to
rid Massachusetts of this wiry peasant; the amperage was from seven to
nine, and it was nineteen minutes and two seconds after midnight when
the medical examiners pronounced the duty done. The body of Nicola
Sacco was lifted from the chair, and carried behind the screen and laid
upon the second slab.
Then for the third and last time the door into the cell corridor was
opened, and the guards entered. Bartolomeo Vanzetti had sat upon his
cot alone, knowing what was happening in the adjoining chamber, but it
had not shaken his nerve; he had had seven years in which to work out
his system of self-discipline. “This is our career and our triumph.” He
rose from his cot, and walked with firm steps, the guards holding him,
one by each arm. When they entered the execution chamber, the guards
released him, and he looked at them--men whom he had known for a long
time, and whom he had taught to respect him, no longer to call him a
wop. They were poor fellows, who maybe had wives and children to keep,
and could not help what they were doing; so he turned to them first, as
became a proletarian martyr. “Good-by,” he said to each, and held out
his hand to each in turn, and shook their hands firmly.
Then he turned to Deputy Warden Hogsett, and took both his hands and
wrung them. “Good-by, I thank you for your courtesy to me.” And then
to the warden, a big towering figure. Vanzetti was quiet and at ease,
as if he were welcoming visitors to his home. “Warden, I want to thank
you for all that you have done for me.” He held out his hand, and the
warden took it.
(“Jesus!” he said, to one of the reporters afterwards. “He shook my
hand, and then I had to raise it to give the signal!”)
Vanzetti walked to the chair and sat down. Then he spoke--words which
he had made the subject of much thought. “I wish to tell you that I am
innocent and never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank
you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime,
not only of this one, but of all. I am an innocent man.”
The guards, well trained, went on with their work, paying no attention
to eloquence. The electrodes were adjusted, the straps made fast. As a
guard started to apply the bandage to Vanzetti’s eyes, he spoke again;
it was the question which Cornelia had asked him, and to which he had
promised an answer. He gave it with all the world for an audience. “I
wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
The guards stepped back, and the warden gave the signal; the
executioner moved the switch, and the body of Bartolomeo Vanzetti