Boston a novel
peaceable solution so difficult; they brought on reaction, and set the
workers back for decades. So for a while Sacco and Vanzetti were left
in the Brockton police-station, forgotten.
Until Betty said, “You are getting poor Grannie so balled up with your
theories and your shocking facts that she’ll lose heart and be scared
out of the movement.”
“For God’s sake,” exclaimed Pierre, “don’t let me do that! In the first
place, I don’t know a thing about your Bart and Nick, they may be two
harmless dreamers. And anyhow, innocent or guilty, no working-class
rebel ever did a tenth part of the harm to society that society has
done to him. No one of them ever carries a tenth part of the guilt that
is borne by the judges and officials who prosecute him. Think of the
guilt of those who caused the war, in order to extend their markets or
to save their investments!”
That was coming close to home for Cornelia and Betty. Said the former,
thinking of her three perfectly self-satisfied sons-in-law, “Can there
be guilt when there is no consciousness of guilt?”
Pierre answered, “That is the sort of question the Puritan conscience
likes to wrestle with. But let us set aside theories, and consider the
practical problem of labor defense. Whether an accused worker is guilty
or whether he is innocent is a matter you can almost never guess in
advance. If he’s guilty, he won’t tell you, and it would be wretched
taste for you to ask. On the other hand, maybe the police have got the
wrong fellow; often enough they know it, and don’t care, because they
figure he’s done something equally bad, and anyhow he’s the sort that
is safer in jail. Then again, maybe it’s a provocateur’s job--something
the bosses have planted, in order to have a pretext for raiding offices
and smashing presses and throwing leaders into jail. Either way, you
can’t know until you get in up to your ears. You may find you’ve got a
chance to expose the police and win public sympathy--or you may have
something that will discredit the movement and turn the public against
you for years.”
“A complicated matter, being a revolutionist!” remarked Cornelia.
And Pierre replied, “You bet your shoes it is--to quote your American
slang.”
VII
On the morning after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti came Mike
Stewart, bringing his “hunch,” which was destined to control their
lives and deaths forever after. Mike himself called it by the more
dignified name of a “theory”; he told it to the district attorney, who
liked it so well that he rented Mike from the town of Bridgewater, and
for a year thereafter the policeman had nothing to do but search out
facts to fit his “theory.”
A part of it was that the same bandits who had committed the South
Braintree hold-up in April had committed the Bridgewater attempt of
the previous December--the one which had been seen in the “detective
machine.” The police proceeded to collect some fifty persons who had
witnessed one or the other of these crimes. Orciani was arrested at
his factory, so there were three bandits to be identified. The usual
procedure is to mix up the suspects with a number of other men and
see if the witnesses can pick the guilty ones. But in the dingy old
police-station of Brockton the three suspects were put in a room, and
the witnesses were brought in and told that these were the bandits, and
could they recognize them? Sacco and Vanzetti were sleepless, unshaved,
unwashed, uncombed--a condition in which a leader of fashion looks like
a bandit. But even so, the witnesses were uncertain, some said they
might be the right men, others said they were surely not.
Several witnesses had seen the bandits in special circumstances, for
example with a cap on; so Sacco was ordered to put on a cap, and did
so. Another had seen the bandit crouched down; Sacco was ordered to
crouch, and the witness thought he looked more like a bandit that way.
Another had seen the bandit pointing a gun; Sacco was ordered to act as
if he were pointing a gun, and the witness was quite sure that made him
look more like a bandit. Witnesses who were obdurate, and wouldn’t stop
saying they were the wrong men, were dropped by the prosecution, and it
was up to the defense to find them if they could. In a great many cases
they did so--but too late.
The police had found a Buick car abandoned in some woods, two miles
from Coacci’s home, and it was part of the “theory” that this had
been used in the two crimes. This “bandit-car” was now brought to the
police-station, and Sacco and Orciani were loaded into it, and with
a detail of the state police, heavily armed, were taken for a tour
of the shoe-towns. Word went in advance, “The bandits are coming,”
and huge crowds gathered. At the time of the South Braintree crime
several workers had run to the windows of the shoe-factory and seen
the bandit-car driving away. Now the scene was reënacted, with these
persons looking from the windows to judge if Sacco and Orciani looked
like the men they had seen. The crowds, meantime, did not wait for a
decision; they knew these were the bandits, and tried to beat them,
and did spit in their faces. It was a grand public circus, and by
means of it the police persuaded three shoe-workers to recognize the
bandits, and to stay persuaded until the preliminary hearing a week
or two later, when they changed their minds and said they couldn’t be
sure. When the trial came, a year later, they had changed again, and
took the stand and identified Sacco and Vanzetti as the bandits, and
made three of the five witnesses upon whom the august Commonwealth of
Massachusetts relied to the death.
On the day after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti the three prisoners
were arraigned before a magistrate. Orciani was charged with operating
a motor-cycle without a tail-light--although his motor-cycle had had
a tail-light and it had been lighted; Sacco and Vanzetti were charged
with carrying revolvers without a license. Bail was denied, on the
pretext of a wartime law. The three victims were taken back to jail,
and the task of fitting the facts to the “theory” was continued.
A week later there was a hearing upon the charge of murder; and here
an unexpected thing happened--the number of bandits was reduced to
two. The district attorney stated that the identification of Orciani
was not sufficient. That seemed strange, because more persons had been
willing to think that Orciani looked like the bandit than had been
willing to think it about either Sacco or Vanzetti. What had happened
was that Orciani had been able to produce an American alibi. Not merely
had he punched his time-clock in the factory that morning, but he
could produce his boss and several other “white men” to swear that he
had been at his machine all day. It was only three weeks back, and he
hadn’t missed a day.
Also it developed that Sacco was to be let off from the Bridgewater
charge--because he, too, had an American alibi. But on the day of the
South Braintree affair, according to his own story, he had gone up to
Boston to get his passports; he had lunched at a café with friends, and
had gone to the consulate, where they remembered him for the comical
reason that he had been told to provide a photograph for his passport,
and had brought one of great size. A clerk remembered it; but then, he
was an Italian, and Italian alibis do not “go” in Yankee police-courts.
As for poor Bart, alas, he had nothing but Italian alibis for
both dates. On the day before Christmas he had sold eels to fifty
housewives, and during the South Braintree crime he had been digging
clams and bait. But such things do not count against a policeman’s
“hunch,” so Bart was charged with both crimes; the prosecution was
going to prove that he was the bandit who had stood on Broad Street,
in Bridgewater, firing a shotgun at the pay-truck, and also that he
was the driver of the murder-car at South Braintree--he who had never
touched a steering-wheel in his poor proletarian life! The moral of
these developments was clear to sarcastic young radicals such as Betty
Alvin--that good little wops had better stay close to the boss, and
punch a time-clock four times a day. Instead of going home at night,
they would be safer kept in pens.
VIII
A lawyer had been engaged to defend Sacco and Vanzetti at these
preliminary hearings, an Irish gentleman by the name of John Vahey.
Some lawyers with criminal practice employ what are known as “runners”
to bring them business; and whether Mr. Vahey knew it or not, it was
an Italian generally known as a “runner” who persuaded the friends of
Vanzetti to employ Mr. Vahey. The lawyer himself was no “runner,” but
a stout gentleman who did not hurry about to find witnesses for his
client; he was content to let the Brinis fetch the wops to his office.
He was active in the politics of Plymouth County, and intimate with
those who controlled its affairs, including the district attorney, Fred
Katzmann; he was an “associate judge,” and went into an arrangement
to share business with Katzmann. It has been said in Vahey’s defense
that Vanzetti was probably the first innocent man he had ever had as
a client. Very possibly Vanzetti was wrong in his fixed idea that his
lawyers had “thrown him down.” He was a hard client to defend, because
he persisted stubbornly in denying that he had been to Johnson’s garage
with Boda the night of his arrest; he would not permit any capitalist
lawyer to persuade him to say a word that might involve another comrade.
The friends of Sacco in Boston had also engaged a lawyer to defend
him. Before a month had passed there were three lawyers in the case,
and one of them was young and confiding, and told how he had heard one
associate say to the other, “See if you can get Sacco to tell where
he buried the money, and we’ll divide it.” A part of the “theory”
became that Sacco had buried the treasure in the garden of his home,
which belonged to Mr. Kelley, his boss; and in each of the next seven
springtimes, when Mr. Kelley’s father got ready to plant potatoes, a
thrill would go through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Sacco’s boss
was digging for the treasure! It was hard on poor Nick, because it
implied that Mr. Kelley thought he was guilty, whereas Mr. Kelley had
trusted Nick as night-watchman.
Cornelia and Betty sent money to help interest these legal gentlemen.
Cornelia and Betty meant to stay in one place all summer, so they would
not need Betty’s full allowance. They rowed on the lake, and climbed
the mountain paths, and listened to all-day and all-night arguments on
the theories of anarchism, syndicalism, communism and socialism, with
the history of these movements in a dozen countries for three-quarters
of a century. There came another letter from Plymouth, telling of
developments, with a message from Bart insisting that Nonna was not to
worry, and not to cut short her rest.
The idea of accusing Bart of the Bridgewater crime seemed to Cornelia
such madness, she could not take it seriously. It was a case of
mistaken identity, which would be cleared up when it was investigated.
“They can’t make such a charge against a man who has lived in a town
for eight years; and when he went about that whole day, peddling eels
to all North Plymouth! If it had been any day but the day before
Christmas, one might say there was a chance of getting the dates mixed;
but everybody knows that Italians eat eels on Christmas, and Bart can
prove that he had a barrel of them. It seems as if somebody has gone
crazy.”
“The bourgeoisie always goes crazy when its property-rights are
threatened,” said Pierre Leon.
“But I was there the day after Christmas,” persisted Cornelia, “and
they told me all about what they had done--Bart and Trando, and
the barrel of eels, and the baker’s horse, and how Trando would