Boston a novel
“What do they want with their hearts and brains?” cried Cornelia; and
Betty, the ferocious, explained matters. Harvard had so many millions
upon millions of endowments, and had not succeeded in producing a great
man for at least a generation. So many hundreds of professors, of every
kind of subject on earth, and they couldn’t teach anything worth while!
Now they wanted the hearts and brains of two wops, to see if they could
find out the secret of greatness. If they studied Nick’s heart, they
might learn about courage; from Bart’s they might find a clew to social
idealism, and the chemical constituents of faith. This fancy gave
great joy to Betty, who went on to picture the medicos peering through
microscopes, and making analyses in test-tubes, to find out the ways of
genius. Mr. Lowell studying blood-counts, to learn how to put a little
human interest into a speech or an essay! The heads of the English
department making drawings of the cells in Vanzetti’s cortex, to find
out how a wop had become a great master of English prose!
The mutilated bodies were turned over to the relatives at last.
Thousands of persons wanted to view them, and pay their last tribute;
but the proprietors of the building in which the defense had two dingy
rooms refused to permit it to happen there; to make sure, they nailed a
joist up and down through the middle of the entrance to their building,
which they figured would keep out coffins! So arrangements were made
with an Italian undertaker on Hanover Street; and the moment it was
known that the bodies were there, ten thousand persons gathered, and
the police had to rope off the entire block, and let in only a few at a
time.
Also they had to start clubbing and jailing again. For Mary Donovan
came with another placard, containing those words which three or four
weeks ago she had nailed to one of the elm trees of the Common: “Did
you see what I did to those anarchistic ----? Judge Thayer.” She
set that placard in front of the two coffins, while the newspaper
photographers prepared to take pictures of it. And of course the police
wouldn’t permit that; had they not abolished free speech in Boston
in order to prevent those words from being put before the public? A
policeman grabbed Mary’s placard, and she, being Irish like himself,
was not above fighting for her own. Other “cops” came running, and
dragged Mary off to jail; and then of course they had to club the
crowds, to keep them from crying “Shame!”
The friends of the defense desired to have a parade to the crematory
where the bodies were to be burned. Many persons desired to go, and why
should they not walk? So began negotiations with officials of this city
of terror, for the right to walk eight miles to a crematory. The first
stipulation was that the walkers must go by the most direct route,
which would take them through obscure streets for the most part, and
past no precious public buildings. The second stipulation was that the
caskets must be carried in a hearse, and not upon the shoulders of men.
The third was that no signs or banners should be borne. No word about
“anarchistic ----”!
“Back to Normalcy,” said the Boston _Herald_; and put all this news
on an inside page. The _Post_ discussed such topics as “The Sunless
Summer” and “Vegetarians and Shoes.” The chiefs of the moving picture
industry, whose orgy with drunken prostitutes had filled the Boston
newspapers while Sacco and Vanzetti were on trial, now held their
meeting in New York and passed a resolution that the case was to be
barred from the screen forever, and that all films of it should be
destroyed. Said Betty, the ferocious: “The great American whore covers
us with her skirts!”
Said Cornelia: “They must have found out what Bart thought of them!
Do you remember, Betty, what he wrote in ‘Events and Victims’?” She
looked up the manuscript, and found the passage in which Vanzetti had
described the entertainment which American capitalism was supplying for
its wage-slaves. “That ought to be published!” exclaimed Betty, and Joe
made a copy of it; but alas, there was no paper in Boston which could
be lured into printing such blasphemous words!
X
Sunday the day of the funeral. The crowds in Hanover Street made all
movement difficult; they were so great that people were pushed through
plate glass windows, and when these crashed there was a panic, because
the crowd thought the police had started shooting. In the roped off
area were two hearses and several limousines; oh, crowning insult--they
were Packard cars! The supersalesman, now enjoying his hard-earned
vacation, was making money as usual! In one car, with curtains drawn,
rode the widow and children of Sacco and the sister of Vanzetti, both
women in a state of collapse. It was an Italian funeral, with great
floral wreaths borne by mourners, and the undertaker marching in a
Prince Albert coat and top hat, in spite of a drizzling rain. State
police--the “Cossacks”--rode ahead and alongside the hearses, to see
that the procession followed the prescribed route. In the rear followed
several open cars full of flowers, and several with mourners, among
them Cornelia Thornwell.
The authorities had given the necessary permit, and had not limited the
number of persons who might march in the procession; but they dared not
let it be too big, for the sake of the moral effect. So the entire
march was a series of battles between those who were determined to
march, and the police who were trying to break them up and shunt them
off into side streets, even if some had to be killed in the process.
The members of the committee and friends of the defense had provided
themselves with red arm-bands, reading: “Remember Justice Crucified.
August 22, 1927,” and the wearers of these arm-bands were singled out
for the fiercest attacks.
The procession moved down Hanover Street, and fifty thousand people
fell in behind after it had passed. So when they came into Scollay
Square, mounted policemen rode into the middle of the throng, and tried
to form a line across the street, barring the bulk of the procession.
The crowds dodged this way and that, to get by; the policemen began to
wield their clubs, galloping their horses, and trampling men and women
beneath the iron-shod hoofs. But a frenzy possessed the mourners; it
was their last chance to express their loathing of the crime that had
been committed, and of the criminals who had done it, and thousands
were ready to die rather than be cut out from the parade. They broke
through again and again, and screaming and cursing people were knocked
down, or jammed through the windows of stores; the younger and
more fleet-footed went racing around the block, so as to catch the
procession farther on.
The hearses continued down Tremont Street, and came to Park Street, the
corner of the Common, where the State House with the golden dome may be
seen upon the hill. To march up Beacon Street and past that State House
had been a fond dream of the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti. To keep
them from realizing it, the police had not merely made a solid blockade
of trucks across Park Street, but had a gang of laborers come and take
up the paving blocks from sections of the street. The laborers stood
watching the show, until the hearses and the crowd had passed; then
they replaced the paving!
The procession moved along Tremont Street; on one side the Common,
on the other the fashionable shops. A solid mass of people all the
way, filling the sidewalks; the newspapers estimated that two hundred
thousand saw the hearses go by. The marchers would have taken all
day, if the police had let them alone. But at Charles Street they had
another device; line after line of empty taxi-cabs drawn up, waiting
for the hearses and the little group of mourners to pass; then the
taxis broke out into the throng. It was against the law to break into a
funeral, but there was no law in Boston except the will of the police.
Who was paying the taxi-cabs for the service was not known. Their
efforts were futile, for the people kept breaking through at risk of
their lives.
No order was possible to the marchers; they just walked as they could;
the crowds fell in behind, mostly with bared heads, in spite of the
heavy rain that had begun to fall. Betty and Joe, Mary Donovan, Powers
Hapgood, Alfred Baker Lewis--all the leaders were there. They were
spreading flowers on the street--but that was against a city ordinance,
said Mike Crowley, who rode with the procession, greatly astonished to
see how many men and women were willing to get soaked for the sake of
two anarchist wops.
Out through the South End; the friends of the defense now forming lines
with linked arms for protection against the police. By the time they
came to Roxbury Crossing, they had a military formation, and were able
to keep the traffic from breaking them up, in spite of all efforts. The
traffic police would signal for traffic to break into the procession,
and cars would force their way a few feet amid cat-calls and screams;
then they would give up, and Sacco and Vanzetti would have their way
for the first time in Boston. One policeman forced a seven-ton truck
into the crowd; the truck driver was attacked with umbrellas, and when
the policeman tried to draw his club, he was swept aside.
It was in that part of Boston called Jamaica Plain that the orders
came to break up the parade at all hazards. A small army of patrolmen
charged into the crowd, wielding their clubs right and left. One
patrolman made his attack in an automobile--darting this way and that,
running people down, a new sport. Others climbed into the cars of the
sympathizers, and clubbed the drivers, and drove the cars out of the
line. Even the hard-boiled newspaper reporters were astonished by
the sights they saw in that battle, and were permitted by their city
editors to write a few plain sentences telling the incidents:
“One officer was to be seen beating a woman in the face with his
fist. A girl was standing near the coal company office, her face
buried in her hands with a split chin.... A policeman stuck his
pistol at the window of a taxi-cab, then turned suddenly, went to
another car, dragged a man out to kick him toward Boston. Persons
who were riding on running boards of autos and taxi-cabs were
dragged off and beaten or booted in the direction of Boston. By
this time the main body was in flight toward Boston, pursued by a
line of policemen who still used their clubs. Women were given no
mercy in the panic.... While one man was being beaten by a sergeant
with an umbrella, his hat was knocked off and, stooping to pick it
up, he was booted by a patrolman. He went down and the patrolman
kicked the hat high in the air.”
It was the process known as “Americanization.”
XI
Ten thousand persons were crowded about the Forest Hills cemetery, with
hundreds of policemen to keep them from getting inside. The hearses
were passed in, and the cars with the reporters and photographers, and
a little group of mourners; the rest of those who had marched eight
miles to attend the ceremony had to stand about outside--unless they
were lively enough to climb the hedge and the iron picket fence. Inside
the little chapel a hundred persons were gathered, and the two coffins
were set upon a dais, covered with flowers, and Mary Donovan took her
place beside them, white and trembling. For two years she had made the
cause of Sacco and Vanzetti her life; she had given up her religion,
her friends, her job; and now it was her opportunity to speak the last
words which the defense had to say to the rulers of Boston.
She lifted her voice; and then--a miracle, such as happens when martyrs
are made in this world! It was discovered that the heart and brain of