Boston a novel
not so many records, and the dust is not so thick! When you find the
book of express receipts, showing the barrel of eels consigned to “B.
Vanzetti, Plymouth,” six days before Christmas, 1919, it will count
with the jury--instead of being set aside, unseen by the agate eyes!
XI
The little party turned their car home that night, well content with
what they had achieved. Next morning they sat down to a conference
with eminent legal authority, and Cornelia offered her testimony, and
learned that it was not available, because most of it was hearsay,
and anyhow, she had better not take the stand, because she would be
questioned concerning Vanzetti’s beliefs, and it was not desirable
to have the jury know that he was an anarchist. Of course everybody
in Plymouth knew it perfectly well, but if it was not introduced in
the evidence, the jury would be ordered to disregard it, and would
do so--that being the merry fiction of the merry legal game. Could
Cornelia testify that Vanzetti was a pacifist, and repudiated violence?
Could she testify that he did not believe in the overthrow of the
United States government by force? No, she could not testify that, and
therefore nothing she could say about Vanzetti’s character would count
with the jurors. How could they fail to be suspicious of an American
woman who confessed to intimate friendship with a dangerous Italian Red?
Furthermore, there was a question whether Vanzetti should be a witness
himself. He could not deny his anarchistic opinions, which would so
antagonize the jurors that they would find him guilty of anything,
regardless of evidence. It was a delicate matter, because Vanzetti
was a draft-evader, and the jury would consist of men who had gone to
the war, or had sent their sons. Also he was an infidel, and the jury
would consist of devout church-goers. There was that letter found on
Vanzetti, denouncing a certain Catholic priest as a “pig.” The jurymen
in Plymouth County were not apt to be Catholics themselves, but they
would think that Italians ought to be Catholics, and it would be
better to appeal to the district attorney’s sense of fair play not to
introduce that letter.
Vanzetti was stubborn, and clamorous to be heard in his own defense;
but then, he would not stop denying that he had met Boda at the Johnson
place the night of the arrest; and how could he expect to get away with
that, in face of the testimony the prosecution could offer, if the
issue were raised? No, Vanzetti must be made to realize that under the
law he was not required to testify, and no conclusion unfavorable to
him could be drawn from his failure to testify.
Again the future rose up and shouted! Ten million hands were waved
unseen, ten million warnings were voiced unheard! The fates that held
Cornelia and Betty at their choice granted no forewarning of the
man with the marble smile and the agate eyes, the supersalesman of
automobiles who seven years later was to be the final jury in the case.
Not once did they hear him repeat his formula, which was to make him
seem like a gramophone through the weary months of the future; the
formula which would balk the friends of love and justice who traveled
from all over the world to appeal to him; the formula which took the
place of all evidence and all thought--“Why did not Vanzetti take the
stand in his own behalf?”
CHAPTER IX
THE WEB OF FATE
I
Plymouth Court-house stands at the head of the square, a large and
stately building of red brick, with ivy climbing the walls, and white
colonial entrances, and a niche containing a figure of justice,
open-eyed. The court-room is bare and white, with a throne of polished
wood, and over it a great seal of the “Plymouth Society,” with the
flags of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts draped
on top. It is all extremely solemn and formal; the bailiff wears a
uniform, and carries a “wand,” or long stick with which he holds the
spectators in awe.
On the morning of the trial of Bartolomeo Vanzetti the room was filled
with spectators from Bridgewater, curious to behold the wicked bandit;
also a few working-people of foreign birth, Italians and Portuguese
of North Plymouth who remembered what Vanzetti had done for them in
the strike. The men had put on celluloid collars with gilt studs and
no ties, the women wore shawls and aprons; they sat, morning and
afternoon, following with strained attention a mysterious procedure in
a strange tongue. There were spectators from Boston, but no reporters
from there; the case excited only local interest, and was left to local
correspondents.
The prisoner was brought in, shackled to a deputy by each wrist; also
a steel cage was brought in, and he was locked inside. This in itself
was almost equivalent to a conviction--it made him look so alarming to
a jury, so much like a wild beast. The district attorney entered--a
stocky man of German parentage, florid, blond, good-looking, smartly
dressed. Fred Katzmann was his name, a Mason and a “joiner,” prominent
in the political ring which governed the county. Most political rings
in America are financed by the local corporations, and exist to carry
out their will; the efficiency of a public official usually consists
in the fact that he knows their needs and wishes so thoroughly that he
does what they want without having to be told.
In this case Fred Katzmann’s course was very easy--to consult his
prejudices. He knew that the Reds were pledged to destroy American
institutions, and therefore it was a patriotic service to destroy the
Reds. Later on he went before the alumni of his college, assembled for
banqueting, and the chairman introduced him as a hero who was going
to save the Commonwealth from its secret foes; the banqueters cheered
him tumultuously, and he made a speech accepting the stern duty.
All the district attorneys of the neighboring counties were making
such speeches at this time--it was an easy way to be popular, and to
conceal orgies of grafting and blackmailing--what was soon afterwards
to be described, in the charges against one of the most oratorical, as
“malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance in office.”
Fred Katzmann was personally an easy-going man, and cultivated a manner
of geniality which made a hit with juries. When the lawyers for the
defense came in, carrying briefcases and looking important, he greeted
them cordially; they were his friends, and during the procedures he
would refer to them as “my brothers.” He would carry on a merry battle
of wits with them, and the moment court was adjourned, he would walk
out side by side with them, and they would sit at lunch and “josh”
each other about the points they had lost or won. It was exactly like
a tennis tournament--except that in tennis they used a ball, while in
this legal game it was a wop.
II
A door in the front of the court-room opened, and there entered a thin,
shrunken old gentleman with a white mustache and a face like parchment.
He wore a black silk robe, and the moment he appeared the bailiff
pounded on the floor with his wand and shouted, “Court!” and all the
lawyers stood up, and the spectators stood up, and remained standing.
The bailiff drew a breath and shouted, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! All
persons having anything to do before the Honorable, the Justices of
the Superior Court, now sitting within and for the County of Plymouth,
draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard! God save the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” Whereupon the wrinkled old gentleman
sat down, and everybody else did the same.
Webster Thayer, judge of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, was what the pathologists call a “ticquer”; that is, he
blinked with a nervous affliction as he gazed about his domain. His
sharp, withered face was a symbol of the old Puritan spirit; his voice,
like a steel saw cutting through wood, was an ancestral inheritance,
produced by three hundred years of cold and foggy winds. He aspired to
exhibit repose, but his fear of so many foreigners in his court-room
showed itself by incessant nervous glances. He was obsessed with a
phobia on the subject of Reds, and talked about it incessantly, with so
much repetition that many persons avoided him, or ruthlessly shut him
up.
Cornelia had never heard of “Web” Thayer before, but he was to be the
subject of her study for seven years, and before long she knew him
completely. During this Plymouth trial he did not know who she was; but
during the second trial, that of Sacco and Vanzetti a year later, he
had heard about her, and he summoned her three times to his chambers
to impress his personality upon her and to justify his ways. So she
learned that the basis of his being was an inferiority complex, a
sense of the gulf which yawned between him and the great ones of his
community, and which he would never cross, even though he won his way
to the Supreme Judicial bench. He was a Thayer, but not of the “right”
ones; and in Massachusetts it is a special offense to bear an honored
name unless you are one of the “right” ones. There are the “right”
Cabots--and assuredly they are not those who used to be called Caboto
and Kabotinsky, and got permission from a too complaisant court to
Americanize themselves. There are “right” Coolidges, and Calvin is not
among them, and would not be, though he were president of the United
States for half a dozen terms.
“Web” lived in Worcester, which is a city in the wilds of the far
west--that is to say, forty miles removed from the cultural influences
of the Back Bay. It is a hardware center, the home of hardware men,
who hustle and “boost” and make “selling talks.” “Web” had gone
to Dartmouth, a small college in the hills of New Hampshire, whose
graduates are looked down upon by the haughty scions of the Harvard
“Gold Coast.” “Web” asserted his uneasy personality, and drew attention
to himself, something the “blue-bloods” never do, because they do
not have to. In this Sacco-Vanzetti affair “Web” would do what the
Commonwealth wanted him to do, but he would do it in such a way that
the Back Bay would blush for him, and comfort itself by calling it one
more sign of the degradation of politics, a consequence of turning over
public affairs to the “mob.”
He was a man of intense vanity, and played the judicial game as a drama
in which he was hero and king. But he could never be sure whether he
was successful in the rôle, and the actor would stop in the middle
of the play to ask the audience. To the lawyers, or any one else who
came to his chambers after the sessions, he would say, “Am I handling
this all right?” To the newspaper reporters he would say, “Now, boys,
give me a good deal on this.” If the reporter happened to be a young
and pretty woman, as it did in at least one case, he would employ the
arts of gallantry, which are somehow less welcome from an old man with
a skin like a mummy’s. He would take a seat beside her on the train
going to the trial, and smile and ogle, and present a flower to her,
and discuss the case. His voice had a penetrating quality, and when the
train stopped, every one in the car would hear what he was saying. He
must have known the mental discomfort he was causing to his auditor,
yet something drove him to go on.
There is an ancient tradition among those who deal with the law that
a judge must not discuss a case in public, at least not while it is
actually before him. But in handling Sacco and Vanzetti, “Web” Thayer
could not keep within these traditional limits. He would talk about the
case in a club dining-room, until all the men would leave the table; he
would approach a Dartmouth professor on the football field, asking in a
loud voice, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards the