Boston a novel
Here were the troubles for Cornelia Thornwell. Four hundred men and
women jammed into cells in Deer Island prison, with broken window-panes
in the midst of New England winter, with no blankets, no mattresses,
and no adequate toilet facilities. Husbands torn from wives, mothers
separated from their babies--and all held according to the genial
Spanish custom known as “incommunicado,” denied lawyers, denied any
information as to their fate. One woman, attending a meeting with her
little girl, had been dragged to jail, and the child left to wander
alone through the streets of Boston all that January night. One man
flung himself over a railing five stories above the ground, and dashed
out his brains in sight of the rest of the prisoners. Another went
insane, and several others were on the verge. And concerning all this
mass of misery no mention in the newspapers, and vilification for any
one who dared to protest.
So Cornelia must sit at the telephone for hours, and argue and plead
with her friends, and rush off to committee meetings, and get a
stenographer and dictate letters, and pay for long telegrams to
congressmen and senators and officials in Washington and New York. She
must besiege club-women, and plead for opportunities to speak. She
must meet newspaper reporters and give long interviews which never saw
the light. She must haunt the doors of officials, and waylay them on
the street when they would not see her. She must start a subscription
list, and go round like a Salvation Army “lassie,” irritating bankers
and lawyers and merchants, and their wives and daughters in the Sewing
Circle, abusing her social position in shameless fashion to get at
people, and tell them such harrowing stories that they would put
up good Brahmin money to buy blankets for Bolsheviks, and milk for
starving babies whose mothers and fathers had committed the crime of
belonging to political parties owned and operated by the Department of
Justice.
And this no job of a few days, but of months. The Quaker presidential
candidate was slow to realize that he could not produce evidence
against eighty per cent of all those he had seized. In Boston, through
an unfortunate oversight, there was a Federal judge who believed that
law-enforcers ought to obey the laws they enforced. He declared from
the bench that a mob was a mob, even when it was made up of Department
of Justice agents. He would issue writs for one prisoner after another,
and when the prisoner was able to prove that he was an American
citizen, or that he hadn’t actually joined the Department of Justice
party, the victim would be turned loose. But all that took time--and
meanwhile there were a thousand or two children to be fed, and as many
falsehoods to be refuted, and only a small group of rebel ladies to do
it.
X
Almost every Sunday during that winter Vanzetti came up to Boston. He
was doing well with his fish-peddling, and in between times shoveling
snow or cutting ice, so he had money for the trip and for propaganda.
In the midst of all this repression he had made up his mind that the
anarchistas must have a paper, and he was raising the seven hundred and
fifty dollars needed to buy a linotype machine; he had even written a
couple of articles to appear in the new paper, and was working hard to
“culture himself,” studying both Italian and English. He came to have
supper with Cornelia one evening, and when she ventured to point out
the dangers of his course, he answered that you could never accomplish
anything if you quit in times of danger. The times of accomplishment
were bound to be times of danger--trust the capitalistas for that.
Many of the Galleani group had been deported; Coacci had been
arrested--one of those two men who had brought a package of books to
Bart--Cornelia had met him. The gruppo had raised a thousand dollars’
bail for him, and now he was under sentence of deportation. Also Nick
Sacco was making his plans to take his family back to Italy. Great
events were coming this next summer--perhaps the real revolution--and
Nick as a man of action wanted to be there.
Yes, it would not be bad to be sent to Italy just now; but alas, you
didn’t always get there! Bart told the terrible story of Compagno
Marucco, who had been put on a steamer and never heard of again. All
the anarchistas believed he had been pushed overboard on the way,
because he had detected some of the government spies working among the
group. Another man had hanged himself in his cell; had he really done
that, or had somebody done it for him? You needed nerves of steel to go
on with propaganda in the midst of events like that!
Bart talked about the spies. One had been exposed by Carlo Tresca in
New York: Ravarini, who had posed as an anarchista for many months, one
of the violent kind, a follower of Ravachol. One of his plans had been
to revive “La Cronaco Sovversiva”; he had offered to get the money, and
had suggested Bart for editor. But Bart had been too modest, he did not
consider himself a well enough educated man.
This Ravarini had been seeking to fasten the bombings onto the Galleani
group; for the government agents had apparently convinced themselves
that this group was guilty. Bart discussed the idea, and he said there
was no such great nonsense in the whole world. He pointed out what had
happened--the police had arrested hundreds of anarchistas, and searched
their homes, and had never found a bomb, nor anything having to do with
a bomb. Some day the truth would come out--the guilt lay with detective
agents, “feller get rich by hunting anarchista.”
“You think they would kill innocent people?” asked Cornelia.
“Is not many people keell-èd, Nonna! Bombe blow up little piece of
house, sometime when people is out, or sleep upstair and not get
hurted. You want keell somebody, is not sooch difficultee, plenty
people keell-èd all time, plenty Italian keell you cheap--what you call
it, black hand. I know sooch feller, plenty, hear heem talk in café,
vanaglorioso for what he do. He say, ‘No sooch great keeller in whole
state Massachusetts; nobody shoot so queeck, so straight.’ You pay heem
onderd dollar, next night your nemico he die. What for make big bombe,
big noise?”
“But they sent bombs by mail, Bart!”
“Shoore, send mail--but he not put on stamp enough--the mail do not
go! What follia, Nonna! Think, amica mia, how easy to find out what is
postage! You not need take bombe to post-office, no sooch reesk--no,
you go any post-office, any town, you say, what postage for take five
pound, ten pound, twenty pound, what you like to send. You say, got
package for New York, for Chicago, any place. You not go self, send
odder man, send child, you get stamp, million people buy stamp. But
see, Nonna--anarchista is sooch fool, he get dinnameet, he pay money,
make twenty bombe, get address, send to this man, to odder man, send to
Boston, New York, Lawrence, Passaic, all place--but not got sense for
finding out ow mooch stamp! Is crazy thing, Nonna, is imbecillità!”
“You think government agents did it?”
“Not go-vérnment, but what you call private agent--big feller, make
million dollar. He make big scare, Congress vote money, big banker
get bad fright, he spend money, he say, you sava my life, you catch
anarchista, you put heem in jail, so he not blow up the bank, he not
keell me. Look, amica mia, you read paper, you see this morning, big
banker make--what you call--notizia--avviso--”
“Advertisement.”
“Avvertisament, whole page, scare people, say polissman must catch the
red, the bomber, the anarchista, musta deport, must put in jail. Is
patriottismo, militarismo--you see in paper?”
Yes, Cornelia had seen it, and not for the first time; it had become
quite the fashion for groups of leading citizens, bankers, merchants,
the Chamber of Commerce or other civic groups, to publish full-page
advertisements warning the public of the imminent danger of red riot
and insurrection. “Yes, I read it,” she told Bart--but was ashamed
to add that among the signers that morning was Rupert Alvin, her
son-in-law, and John Quincy Thornwell, her nephew-in-law!
XI
Almost a year had passed since the mailing of those “May Day bombs,”
and still the police had not succeeded in catching any of the senders;
so naturally there was dissatisfaction on the part of patriots. What
was the purpose of a huge secret service agency, built up at enormous
expense? The loyal newspaper publishers forbore to express impatience
in print, but privately they were outraged. A first-class red scare
meant millions in increased sales, but how could the most ingenious
editors and reporters keep excitement alive without a few facts?
The Department of Justice had one set of clews. A bomb had blown out
the front of the home of the Attorney-General, the Quaker gentleman who
was planning to move to the White House, and the man who carried this
bomb had apparently himself been blown up. The authorities claimed to
have identified the fragments as belonging to an Italian anarchist by
the name of Valdinoci, one of the Galleani group. He had worn sandals,
and in his pockets had been some leaflets in crude English, proclaiming
anarchist ideas. The purpose for which the spy Ravarini had been set to
work was to find the printing office in which this circular had been
set up.
Ravarini sent contributions of money to Malatesta in Italy, and got
letters from him, and then appeared among the comrades in Boston and
New York, a very ardent Red, with literature to be printed, and precise
ideas as to how it was to look. He would hang about an anarchist
print-shop for several weeks, and have his stuff set up many times,
or would come and set it up for himself. In this way he tried all the
type in several printing offices; and at last in a shop in Brooklyn he
found, or claimed to find, what the Department of Justice believed was
the type from which the Valdinoci leaflets had been printed. It was the
office of an anarchist paper called _Il Domani_--“To-morrow”--and the
printers of this paper, two Italians by the name of Salsedo and Elia,
were arrested and taken to the offices of the Department of Justice in
the Park Row Building in lower New York.
The genial custom of holding prisoners without allowing them to
communicate with their friends or even with an attorney is one for
which we have neglected to invent an American name. But for the custom
of torturing prisoners to make them confess, we have our jolly slang,
“the third degree,” and all judges and lawyers in America know that it
is employed, and all pretend not to know it, and when evidence obtained
by torture is produced in court, all judges and lawyers solemnly accept
it, and at the same time go on believing in the constitutional rights
of accused men. It is obvious that in no other way can the system of
inequality of property be maintained, and any one who denounces the
“third degree” is liable to suspicion of “redness.”
Salsedo and Elia were held for three weeks in the Department of Justice
offices with no warrant of law. At last Salsedo succeeded in smuggling
out a letter to Vanzetti, who took it to the anarchist group in Boston.
They knew without being told that the two men were being tortured, for
the purpose of forcing them to implicate other anarchists in bombing
plots. On Sunday, April 25th, there was a meeting of the group and
it was decided that somebody must go to New York to consult with the
comrades there and see what could be done for the victims. The choice
fell upon Vanzetti, and he went, and called upon Carlo Tresca, editor
of _Il Martello_, whom he had never seen before. “Don’t you know me,
Carlo?” he said, gently. “I am Vanzetti.” He had been sending in
collections for the support of the paper, and occasionally writing