Boston a novel
leaped as the others had done. Nineteen hundred and fifty volts were
estimated to be sufficient for this less robust person, a dreamer and
a man of words rather than of action. Many, many words he had both
spoken and written, but now no more. The current was turned off, and
the medical men made their examination, and at twenty-six minutes and
fifty-five seconds past midnight they pronounced that the last spark
of anarchism had been extinguished from the august Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. The warden had a solemn formula to recite, but his voice
almost failed him, and not all the witnesses heard the words: “Under
the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been
legally carried out.”
The third body was laid on the slab, and the doors of the execution
chamber were opened--it had grown very hot, with the many volts of
electricity and the tense emotions of martyrs. Also, the odor of burned
hair made one ill; the night breeze was very welcome. The guards and
witnesses went outside, and wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and
from the backs of their wilted collars. “Christ!” said the deputy
warden. “Did you hear what he said? He forgave me! Now what do you make
of that?”
VII
The representative of the Associated Press hastened to the officers’
club. Not often does one man carry a message to the whole world. He
entered the room with the hundred ravening reporters, and had to mount
a chair so that all might have an equal chance to hear. “No features,”
he said. “Entirely colorless.” The proper professional air; if his
“assignment” had been Mount Calvary, he would have said the same. If
Jesus had raised a row at the last moment--if he had tried to escape,
and had knocked down the captain of the centurions--that would have
been “hot news.” Or if he had cursed God, instead of merely asking
why God had forsaken him. Obvious enough that God would not pay any
attention to the leader of a Jewish rabble, a common workingman, born
in a stable in the flea-infested village of Bethlehem!
So likewise this death of Sacco and Vanzetti--“no features.” No,
they hadn’t confessed--except that Sacco had confessed to being an
anarchist. He had cried: “Viva l’anarchia!” (“How the hell do you spell
it? Has it got a ‘k’?”). No one had collapsed, or made what you would
call a scene. Sacco’s complexion had been white, you might almost say
green. (“The way Mary Splaine described him--I remember at the Dedham
trial.”) Vanzetti had shaken hands with everybody, very politely.
(“Anarchist propaganda! A grandstand play!”) He had said--the bored
correspondent consulted his bunch of papers, on which he had jotted
down a few words--he said that he forgave everybody--no, it was “some
people.” (“The little infant Jesus! Ain’t they lambs, these Reds?”)
The room was gray with tobacco smoke, an inferno of heat--the windows
having been boarded up, for fear somebody might “throw something in.”
The clamor was deafening--the clicking of eighteen telegraph keys,
and the voices of men shouting over the telephones, each trying to
hear himself above the uproar--that competition which is the life of
capitalism. Men standing against the wall scribbling, or writing on
their knees, each hoping to file his words the first. The three big
press associations would take care of the main outlines of the news for
all the papers of the country; they had already sent three “flashes”
on each execution; now they would follow with details. But a hundred
papers had sent special correspondents, and these pleaded for “human
interest stuff,” hounding those who had witnessed the events.
The warden had gone to his office; he was gray, and the perspiration
could not be kept from his forehead, nor the trembling from his whole
body. He invited his deputy to have a drink with him, and opened his
cupboard for the purpose; but there entered Mike Crowley with the
police commissioner, a blue-blood, appointed by the Governor. The
warden didn’t think it quite right for that high-up personage to see
him indulging his appetite at this moment, so he hastily shut the
cupboard door again. He had to sit down in a chair. The deputy kept
saying: “He shook both my hands! And he forgave me! I never saw such a
thing! I couldn’t conceive of it!”
The news was spread by a thousand telegraph wires, and in a
hundred cities great crowds learned it from the bulletin boards of
newspapers; for the most part in silence, but sometimes with groans
and sobs. The Boston _Evening Transcript_ had kept its broadcasting
station open--radio WBET--entertaining the listeners with music and
miscellaneous news all evening. The comfortable population of New
England sat in their easy chairs and absorbed the easy entertainment:
the WBET Troupers in “Not Quite Such a Goose,” a comedy in one act;
Boots and His Nighthawks, dance music; the Klassay Boys; the Handy
Instrumental Trio; Doc Wassermann’s Orchestra; and the Correct Time.
In the news that day all kinds of thrills: Ed Farrell’s hitting had
been a large factor as the Braves won three straight from the Cubs; two
school boys were leading the field in the first half of the qualifying
round for the amateur golf title; a girl tennis queen had won an
impressive victory in New York, and the French Davis cup team had
arrived in Boston. More serious items: St. Mark’s Church had benefited
by the will of a millionaire manufacturer of extracts; eight hundred
Catholic teachers from a hundred and thirty-five parochial schools
were in convention; the city council had voted three hundred thousand
dollars for a golf links; the wife of a moving picture favorite had
obtained a divorce from her husband, after charging him eight hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for his freedom. The flappers of Boston
listened, and reflected: “If I could get to marry somebody like that, I
could live on the alimony the rest of my life.” Radio central station
WBET, the Boston _Evening Transcript_: “The juice was turned off,
and Vanzetti was officially pronounced dead at twelve, twenty-six,
fifty-five. The orchestra will now play, ‘The End of a Perfect Day.’”
VIII
In every great capital of the world there were mass meetings and
protests that night. In London a mob marched upon Buckingham Palace,
and had to be ridden down by mounted men--quite as if it were Boston
Common. In Berlin there were a score of meetings, ending with parades.
In Geneva the demonstrants raided the American embassy, and when
clubbed away, broke the windows of the League of Nations Palace. Even
in far-off Tokio the American ambassador had to receive a deputation of
labor leaders, and explain that he had no control over executions in
Massachusetts.
In Paris there had been a general strike, and on the night of the
execution there were street demonstrations, with mobs shouting curses
at Americans whenever they met them--which was frequently. An American
playwright and his wife asked for police protection, and when the
official learned that they knew German, he advised them to speak it for
a while. An odd freak of history--only ten years since the battle of
the Argonne, and here was a man who had taken part in it, being told to
speak the language of the Boche!
It was dawn when the workers of Europe got the news, and they went to
their tasks with hearts blazing. To them it was a personal matter,
for they had friends in America, and knew the attitude of native New
England to its foreign workers. There were guards before all American
embassies and consulates, and few escaped without broken windows.
In London forty persons were injured in the rioting; in Australia
eighteen hundred were discharged for taking part in a strike; in South
Africa the American flag was burned on the steps of the town hall of
Johannesburg.
On the evening of the 23rd in Paris huge masses of workers were
driven about the streets by the police. They would scatter, and
then reassemble, wherever Americans were to be met. They raided the
cabarets of Montmartre, and showered the patrons with broken glass. The
“Moulin Rouge,” shrine of tourist culture, was demolished, and when
the panic-stricken patrons got outside, they found their automobiles
overturned and the tires cut. Unkind and inexplicable it seemed to
amiable globe-trotters, who had sent over their boys and won the war
for the French, and now, finding that the French could not pay their
debts, were permitting them to work it off by entertaining several
hundred thousand bond-holders every summer. Large round gentlemen in
golf-pants, with horn-rimmed glasses and rosy cheeks, ate the best food
in the country, and drank the best wines, and had the best dress-makers
to decorate their bouncing jolly wives, or the lean tall ones who took
culture seriously. They rode about in rows on large motorbuses, with
guide-books in hand, admiring indiscriminately; they scattered money to
right and left, paying double prices, determined to have the best of
everything in the world.
The wage-slaves of French factories, half starved for generations,
read in their socialist and communist papers of the death of Sacco
and Vanzetti; and in the same issue they read how the wife of an
American millionaire was introducing a new fashion in carved emeralds
from India, of which jewelers in the rue de la Paix had a few rare
specimens. The Chicago harvesting-machine queen had paid approximately
eighteen million francs--the life-time earnings of several hundred
French workingmen--for a necklace containing eighty-nine such jewels,
minutely carved in relief to represent events in Hindu history. She had
been the sensation at Biarritz when she appeared on Baron Fascini’s
yacht, wearing this necklace as the sole ornament on her newest Oxford
bags pajamas suit of natural colored pongee, and a royal blue jacket
with gold buttons. Such munificence made prosperity for all Paris, and
kept many thousands of workers alive; yet they refused to love their
benefactors, but called them dirty names, and threw stones through the
windows of the cafés which exhibited the depravities of Paris to the
Puritan trade.
The wisest of Frenchmen had written a letter to Governor Fuller. “I say
to you, beware of making martyrs. This is the unforgivable crime that
nothing can wipe out and that weighs on generation after generation.”
But alas, the name of Anatole France meant nothing to a salesman of
motor-cars who read the _Saturday Evening Post_; that letter had
doubtless been burned in the furnaces, along with all the others. And
now Massachusetts had made her martyrs, and stood upon her pedestal of
self-righteousness. The more the world hated her, the more proud she
would be, to be right while everybody else was wrong. “Massachusetts,
there she is!” said Daniel Webster, darling of the “golden mob.”
“Behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world
knows it by heart. The past at least is secure.” So the golden ones
would continue to orate, while the names of her two martyrs swelled to
a battle-cry of the disinherited of the earth. Until that day when the
workers of Europe began to take Joe Randall’s advice and repudiate the
debts!
IX
The corpses were in a mortuary, still held by the authorities. Then,
horror of horrors, the friends of the defense learned that the bodies
were being mutilated, the hearts and brains of both men were to be
turned over to a medical school--of all places, Harvard University! It
was a custom with the bodies of executed men, not a special indignity
planned for these two--so the newspapers explained. Did the authorities
have a right to do it? Or did they just do it? Nobody seemed to know.
To the friends of the two martyrs it was the final insult--they could
not have been more outraged if they had seen the august president of
Harvard thumbing his nose at them.