Boston a novel
brother-in-law would go over what they had done to Jerry, and many
times wish they had done it a little differently!
Betty Alvin found out about this, because she ran into Lucile Walker
in the lobby of one of the hotels. They had not met since Betty’s
departure for Europe, more than a year ago; so they rushed into each
other’s arms, girl fashion, and then adjourned to the tea-room to talk
things over. Lucile had solved her financial and other problems in
the good old established way; she was now Mrs. Percy G. Townsend, her
husband a manufacturer of some kind of electrical equipment. He was
young and enthusiastic, and so was his wife, and they were going to
work hard and build up a business, and then some day one of the big
banking groups would take it over.
Betty told a little about her adventures in Hungary and Russia and
Plymouth, Massachusetts; after which there was an embarrassed pause on
Lucile’s part, and she said, “I suppose you know what Papa is doing?”
When Betty said she didn’t, Lucile told about the suit that was coming;
and when Betty said that she was not taking her father’s side in
his business fights, Lucile told more of the story. It was going to
mean a dreadful lot of publicity for all of them, because those big
State Street bankers would be put on the witness stand and questioned
about the deals they had made, and how they had divided Mr. Walker’s
properties. Betty said she had told her mother that she would never
touch any of that money; just now she was wrestling with the problem
whether she ought to take any money at all from her father. She was
able to earn her own living, and wanted to--but also she wanted to give
her time to organizing a Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and she couldn’t earn
a living at that.
Betty went home and told her grandmother; and so when Cornelia happened
to meet Henry Cabot Winters, she was able to pose as a woman of the
world, in touch with secret news channels. Henry, of course, had
no trouble in guessing how she knew, and there developed a curious
situation. A couple of years ago he had been indignant at the idea
that Jerry Walker might be using Cornelia as a means of getting
information from the Thornwells; but now he wanted to use Cornelia to
get information as to the plans of Jerry Walker! He went so far as to
propose a “swap”: if Cornelia would find out all she could from the
Walkers, Henry would use his inside connections to help Cornelia’s
beloved bandits. He would get in touch with the officials, and find out
what their plans were, and might even be able to find some way to get
those rascals off.
Somehow this tickled Cornelia’s funny-bone, and she burst into
laughter. “You and Rupert must be badly scared,” she said; and after
Henry had made sure that she was not going to talk to the Walkers about
it, he admitted that they were. It was not that they had done anything
wrong--nobody in Boston ever does that--but it was going to be such a
mess, to have the letters and telegrams and confidential memoranda of
a great banking project spread out in the newspapers.
“Can’t you clean out your files?” asked Cornelia, with a twinkle in
her eye. He answered that it wasn’t so easy as it sounded, because
one document referred to the next, and there were copies in a dozen
different banks. If you took out very much, your employees were bound
to know it, and that exposed you to spying and blackmail. Uneasy lies
the head that wears a crown!
XV
Troubles! Troubles! Even in far-off Italy, that summer and fall, people
were occupied in making troubles for Rupert Alvin and his associates.
The big bankers had filled up their vaults with the gold-embossed and
red-sealed financial promises of European governments; and vain was
the hope to save themselves by unloading this paper on the public.
Because after a bank customer had bought it, he generally came back to
leave it as security up to eighty percent of its market value; and how
could Rupert refuse to lend money on a bond which he had certified as
an investment for widows and orphans? So it had come about that every
time a European premier sneezed, Rupert Alvin jumped in his sleep; when
the anarchists paraded in Milan or Turin and waved their black flags,
Rupert couldn’t sleep at all.
That summer the radical labor unions of Italy made their long expected
coup--moving in and taking possession of the principal steel and
machine plants of the country. But having got in, they didn’t know what
to do next, because they could not turn a wheel of the plants without
coal, and the coal had to come from England or America, in English
or American ships, upon English or American credit. Were English
or American coal men going to extend credit to Italian anarchists,
anarcho-syndicalists, communist-anarchists and left-wing socialists?
The coal men of England and America, like all the other big business
men of those countries, were going to do what their Rupert Alvins
told them; and the Rupert Alvins said thumbs down on Reds. So the
Italian workers had to make peace with their masters, and give up
the plants; and then it was necessary for the masters to organize a
counter-revolutionary government, to break up the labor unions and kill
off the leaders. To do that they had to have the machinery of reaction
and slaughter--and where else should they come for it but to America?
So it happened that Rupert Alvin, in the midst of all his troubles
with Ponzi, and Simon Swig, and the half dozen closed banks, and the
threatened Elevated Railway scandal, and the hiding of evidence in the
Jerry Walker case, and the unhappiness over Betty and Cornelia--with
all this nightmare-load riding his shoulders, Rupert Alvin had to
interview agents of the banking and manufacturing interests of Italy,
and listen to plans for the coup d’état which was to turn that country
into a dictatorship of big capital. No possible way to avoid it--unless
all the money that had been loaned to Italy during and since the war
was to be lost. The bankers of Boston and New York and Philadelphia and
Chicago had to get together and do for Italy what they had already done
for Hungary and Roumania and Czechoslovakia and Finland and Esthonia
and Latvia and Lithuania--so many miserable little bonded states that
it gave a hundred percent American a headache to learn the names.
And meantime Bartolomeo Vanzetti paced his cell, in the space eight
feet by one and a half allotted him for pacing. He knew what was
happening, because his friends brought him a few facts, and he could
reconstruct the rest, with that clear mind which understood social
forces. He knew that it meant the ruin of all his hopes, all chance of
freedom for the peasants and wage-slaves of Italy for years, perhaps
decades. He knew what the American bankers would do; he foretold
how, when the time came to float the loan, they would have the
newspapers bought and the propaganda ready, and would carry the mass of
Italian-Americans into reaction with them. Meantime they had Vanzetti
in jail, where he was safe--and they were going to see to it that he
stayed!
CHAPTER X
THE LEGAL SYSTEM
I
On the 11th of September, 1920, the grand jury of Norfolk County
brought indictments against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
charging them with the murder of the paymaster and guard at South
Braintree in the previous April. This county shared with Plymouth the
same district attorney; and Nick and Bart were brought before the
same Judge Thayer. They pleaded not guilty, and the trial was set for
February. Meantime Bart went back to the tailor-shop at Charlestown,
serving his sentence for the Bridgewater crime; while Nick returned to
the county jail at Dedham--a very unhappy man, because they gave him
nothing whatever to do in this prison, and he nearly went out of his
mind.
Meantime a little group in Boston set about organizing what they
called the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. In the beginning it
consisted entirely of Italians, the foremost among them being Aldino
Felicani, anarchist printer, a tall, ascetic-looking young man,
soft-voiced and reserved. He would set up type for the circulars, and
translate them into Italian. Others would address envelopes, and visit
the meeting-places of radicals in neighboring towns, and circulate
subscription lists. So would come a few dollars here and a few dollars
there. At the outset there was no office, no secretary, only the
volunteer labors of a few comrades.
Joe Randall had finished his book on the “White Terror”; he had lost
hope of bringing it up to date, since events happened faster than pen
could move. Now he became a volunteer press agent for the committee;
he wrote news stories, and made carbon copies, and went about trying
to cajole this editor and that into giving a little publicity. With
him came another young journalist, Art Shields, a tireless worker;
you would see lights burning and hear typewriters clicking in the
office until two or three o’clock in the morning. Betty learned to
make speeches, and put her youth and beauty and social prestige to
work; she would visit labor headquarters and “vamp” the officials,
seeking to overcome the bitter prejudice of Irish-Catholic and Yankee
labor leaders against a pair of wops who were admitted to be infidels,
anarchists and draft-dodgers. Cornelia and Betty would go together to
places where they encountered ladies with blue blood ever so slightly
tinged with pink. The services the pair had rendered to the suffrage
cause--now victorious--gave them prestige, and they could get small
checks.
The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee was from the outset a peculiar
organization. It consisted largely of a name, and nobody could say just
who were its members, or what was their authority. Those Americans who
later joined and helped to build it up did so from sympathy with an
oppressed group, and they served as a “front”; they were featured in
the newspapers, they made speeches, and conferred respectability. But
they did not know so much about the case, and naturally they had to
defer to the Italians in a crisis.
Among these latter, also, appeared a division; there was an Italian
“front”: such men as Felicani, the printer, and Felice Guadagni, the
journalist whom Cornelia had met when he came down to help in the
Plymouth cordage strike; also Rosina Sacco, wife of the prisoner, an
alert and intelligent woman, devoted to her husband’s cause. These
were known; but there were others who stayed in the background, and
in a time of crisis would reach out a hand, as it were from behind a
curtain, and influence a decision. These were anarchists, intimates
of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it was easy enough to understand why they
kept hidden; they stood in danger of deportation, and perhaps of being
accused of crimes, along with the two in jail. But it made committee
functioning difficult, when you never knew what decision would be
changed, or by whom, or for what reason. Public statements would be
prepared and issued in English, and then translated into Italian,
and the discovery would be made that the Italian version was quite
different, and even contradictory; yet it would not be known just how
this had happened.
There was the element of fear, and of course, the element of
suspicion. It was inevitable that the enemy should send spies among
the committee--and that these would be persons sufficiently cunning
to pose as “good radicals.” From first to last the prosecution was
fully informed as to everything that went on among the committee, the
decisions that were taken as well as the arguments and the quarrels.
These spies came and went; and after they were gone, they would joke
about how they had collected money for the cause and spent it having a
good time in their own fashion. Then you would hear the great ones of