Boston a novel
other day?” The horror of these words became such in Massachusetts that
the Commonwealth had to send its policemen with hickory clubs to crack
the skulls of demonstrants who carried the words on a banner. Because
there was no way to keep them from being spoken aloud, Boston Common
had to be closed to public speakers for the first time in its three
hundred years of history.
III
One by one the talesmen took the stand, and were questioned; under the
Massachusetts practice, all this questioning was done by the judge, and
the defendants’ lawyers could only exercise the right of challenge. One
by one the jurors were selected: Arthur W. Burgess, shoemaker of the
town of Hanson, Henry S. Burgess, caretaker of the town of Wareham,
Joseph Frawley, shoe-finisher of the town of Brockton, Charles A. Gale,
clerk, of the town of Norwell--so it went, all Anglo-Saxon names.
Put none but Americans on guard! Edwin P. Litchfield, shoe-worker of
Pembroke, Oliver B. Poole, clerk of Brockton, Alfred M. Shaw, Jr.,
laborer of Carver, Charles C. Wilbur, tackmaker of Kingston: such
little people of the old stock, having failed for one reason or another
to become rich, looked with bitter contempt upon the immigrants who
came pouring into the country, to beat down wages and make life harder
for the “white men” of New England. Far from having any sense of class
solidarity, they clung to the American idea that their children would
rise and join the leisure class; their attitude to the Italian was that
of the poor whites of the south to the Negroes. “All these wops stand
together,” said one juryman to another, discussing the case at lunch in
a restaurant. The remark was overheard, but nothing came of it.
Another juror, Arthur S. Nickerson, a foreman in the Plymouth Cordage
Company! Another foreman of that same company had thrown Vanzetti, the
agitator, out of their plant, and kept him out four years and more;
others had refused him employment, and some one had caused him to
be shadowed by detectives for eighteen months after the strike. Now
Nickerson was to help decide whether or not Vanzetti should be set at
liberty to lead another strike, and deprive the cordage company of
another two hundred thousand dollars a year in extra wages! Vanzetti’s
friends saw with dismay his lawyers permit such a juror to be accepted.
They asked themselves, could it be because one of the lawyers was
a stockholder in the company, and looking to the company for legal
business as well as for dividends? It was permissible to ask.
The assistant district attorney rose, and addressed the jury, telling
them what he was going to prove. He told them all that elaborate
“theory” about the Coacci house and the bandit-car, which had been
stolen a month before the Bridgewater crime, and found in Manley woods
abandoned after the South Braintree crime. He brought this car, a
Buick, in front of the court-house, and he told them about Boda, and
how he was going to prove that Boda had been driving a Buick car a
short while before the crime. He told them about Orciani--despite the
fact that they had had to drop Orciani on account of an American alibi.
He told them about Sacco, despite the fact that they had had to drop
Sacco from this case on account of another American alibi. He built up
in the jury’s mind an elaborate picture of bandit-gangs, bandit-houses
and bandit-cars--and then in the course of the trial he failed to
produce a particle of evidence to connect either Sacco, Coacci, Orciani
or Boda with any crime, or to connect Coacci’s house with any crime,
or to connect any one of the five men with the so-called bandit-car.
One scrap of testimony--a milkman had seen Boda driving a Buick car a
month or two before the crime; or at least he thought it was Boda and
he thought it was a Buick. Yet they brought in all this complicated and
alarming mass of “theory,” not merely at this Plymouth trial, but at
the later trial of Sacco and Vanzetti for the South Braintree crime;
they showed the bandit-car in both cases, and the bullet-hole in it,
and planted the mass of suspicion in the minds of both juries.
IV
Benjamin F. Bowles to the stand: a special officer employed by the
shoe-company, and at the same time a member of Mike Stewart’s police
force in Bridgewater. He had been riding in the seat alongside the
driver of the truck, when two bandits, one with a shotgun, the other
with a revolver, had rushed out and opened fire. The chauffeur of
the paytruck had fainted from fright, and Bowles had seized the
steering-wheel and guided the truck with his left hand, while with
his right he fired a revolver at the shotgun bandit, until the bandit
turned and ran. Later in the trial Bowles took the stand again and
changed his testimony, so as to make it fit with the story he had told
at the preliminary hearing: he now swore that he had fired, not at the
shotgun-bandit, but at the other one, the revolver-bandit. So here was
the picture this super-policeman presented to the jury: he had steered
a fast-moving truck with his left hand, fired a revolver at a bandit
with his right hand, and at the same time used his eyes to study the
appearance of a second bandit, so effectively that he could give a
detailed description fitting the features, hair, eyes and clothing of
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, now sitting in the prisoner’s dock before him!
At the preliminary hearing Bowles had been “pretty positive” that the
shotgun bandit had had a “short and croppy” mustache; but now at the
trial he was “positive” that this bandit had had a “bushy” mustache.
Next came a shoe-inspector, Frank Harding, known as “Skip,” who had
witnessed the crime. He had talked to a reporter of the Boston _Globe_,
an hour or two afterwards, and described the bandit as “smooth-shaven.”
At the preliminary hearing he had described him as having “an
overgrown Charlie Chaplin mustache.” Now at the trial he identified
him as Vanzetti. He had positively identified Orciani as the other
bandit; but that fact was not evidence at the trial. Neither was the
_Globe_ reporter’s testimony, for that was not discovered until years
later--when it might as well not have been discovered at all. To the
Pinkerton detectives “Skip” had described the bandit-car as a Hudson;
and he had been an automobile mechanic and knew cars. But now he swore
it was a Buick--which happened to be what the “theory” required.
Then came the paymaster, Cox, who had described the shotgun bandit at
the preliminary hearing as “short and of slight build.” Now he made it
agree with Bowles--“five feet eight.” But no effort of the district
attorney could get him to say that he was sure Vanzetti was the man.
Then came the elderly Georgina Brooks, and with her the age of miracles
came back. Mrs. Brooks testified that she had looked out of the window
of the Bridgewater railroad depot--she specified which window--and had
seen “fire and smoke from a gun.” It so happened that between that
window and the spot where the firing had occurred, there intervened the
full bulk of two two-story houses. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense employed
a surveyor to make a map of the scene--but like everything else, it
was too late.
Also Mrs. Brooks testified that on her way to the depot, and before the
crime, she had inspected the bandit-car and the bandits. She identified
Vanzetti as a man she had looked at twice, and who had looked at her
“severely.” Why she should have turned to look at the car a second
time, and been so particular about examining the features of a man
sitting casually in an automobile was something Mrs. Brooks could not
explain. But she admitted that with one eye she could barely make out
the silhouette of objects, and that she had been undergoing treatment
for the other eye.
Then young Shaw, a schoolboy who had heard the firing and dodged behind
a tree. He had seen the shotgun-bandit run away, at a distance of a
hundred and forty-five feet, and said that he could tell the man was a
foreigner by the way he ran. “What sort of a foreigner?” and the boy
replied, “Either Italian or Russian.”
“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a
Norwegian?”
“Yes.”
“What is the difference?”
“Unsteady.”
Then came Mike Stewart, large, powerful, heavy-lidded. He brought with
him his theory--but you may be sure he never mentioned the “detective
machine,” from which the theory had been born! Neither did he mention
the Pinkerton reports, and how they confuted the testimony of “Skip”
Harding. “Skip” had taken down the number of the bandit-car, and
given a memorandum to Mike, who had unfortunately lost it. Also,
unfortunately, there was no number-plate on the car which the police
had found in the Manley woods.
They introduced Vanzetti’s cap, and a man swore it resembled the cap
worn by the shotgun-bandit--although Cox and Mrs. Brooks had sworn
to a shotgun-bandit in a soft hat. And that was practically all they
had to offer, except for an empty twelve-gauge shotgun shell which
they claimed to have picked up at the scene of the shooting. When
Vanzetti had been arrested, he had had four shotgun shells in his
pocket, and these were put into evidence, but the jury never heard
Vanzetti’s story of how he came to have them. He had spent the day
of his arrest at Sacco’s, while the family was packing up for Italy,
and these shells, left over from hunting, were picked up on a shelf;
Vanzetti had put them into his pocket, saying that he would turn them
over to some comrade and get fifty cents for the cause. But that story
must not be told to the jury, because Vanzetti would be asked what he
mean by the “cause,” and he would have to answer that it was the evil
cause of anarchism. Nor would it do to put Sacco on the stand, or his
wife, because that would bring in the other crime, and the lawyers
were maintaining their legal fiction that the jury knew nothing about
it--although, of course, every one of them had read about it on the
front page of all the papers, and the assistant district attorney had
brought Sacco in as a part of the “theory”!
V
Such was the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against
Bartolomeo Vanzetti. And now it was the defendant’s turn to produce his
alibi, and persuade a Yankee jury to believe it. Cornelia and Betty and
Joe, watching these proceedings day by day with strained and fearful
attention, realized too late how difficult it was going to be. There
sat those native sons of New England, lean-faced and stern--elderly
men, most of them, because the younger and more active found means to
avoid jury duty. Men with such names as Burgess and Gale and Litchfield
and Nickerson and Shaw were invited to believe the testimony of
Vittorio Papa and Carlo Balboni and Vincenzo Brini and Enrico Bastoni
and Teresa Malaguti and Adalaida Bongiovanni and Marguaritta Fiocchi:
men with black hair and eyebrows, broad faces and high cheek-bones,
uncouth and sinister, clad in ill-fitting cheap store-clothes; women
short and stout, with broad mouths and low foreheads, with no collars
to their shirt-waists, wearing aprons in front of them and dingy shawls
about their shoulders, speaking a foreign jabber which was turned into
English by an interpreter who looked as much like a bandit as the
others. These were the “Dagoes” who were taking bread out of the mouths
of the old stock, swarming into the factory towns, carrying fire-arms,
living like pigs, and raising litters of as many little pigs as any
farmer ever saw. “These wops all stand together,” said one juryman;
and all native New England agreed.
Mrs. Mary Fortini, Bart’s landlady, told how she had waked him up at
six o’clock that morning before Christmas, and how he had gulped down
his bread and coffee, and hurried to get out his cart and his eels.