Boston a novel
Massachusetts, who had employed these spies, solemnly charging that the
funds of the committee had been stolen!
II
Among both English and Italian groups there were sharp divisions
according to political beliefs. Some insisted that this was a criminal
case, and should be handled as such; others thought it was a case of
labor persecution, to be featured as an episode in the class struggle.
Strange as it might seem, the anarchists for the most part took the
former view; they saw clearly that efforts to make anarchist propaganda
might not merely bring about a conviction of the two men, but might
get their defenders into trouble. But a socialist like Joe Randall
was free from such fear, and to him the case was an effort of big
business to put two of its dangerous enemies out of the way; he could
never write anything about the case that was not disguised propaganda
for socialism, and of course he did not like to have his propaganda
cut out by non-socialist members of the committee. Young persons like
Betty Alvin, who at this stage of her life insisted that she was a
communist--such young persons wanted to put in a different kind of
propaganda, and their persistence increased as the case grew more
conspicuous.
It was a controversy that would never cease, up to the very last hour,
and even beyond it--when men and women fought with deadly bitterness
over the question of what should be done with the ashes of the victims.
You saw the germs of it at the first meeting, when eight or ten
ill-assorted enthusiasts fell to discussing what kind of lawyer should
be employed for the trial. Should they get a labor man, who would make
an appeal to the movement throughout the country? Or should they get a
respectable lawyer, who would confer dignity upon the case, and impress
the public and the jury in the good old Boston way? Still another
possibility, should they look for a criminal expert, with knowledge of
the trickeries of a highly technical game? Joe and Betty united for
the first plan, Cornelia urged the second, while the Italians divided
between the first and third.
A powerful factor in the decision was, of course, the two prisoners,
who never wavered for a moment; to them it was a class-war case,
they were being persecuted because of their threat to the rich of
Massachusetts. To Vanzetti the very idea of respectability was an
insult, the idea of legal trickery nearly as bad. All such hopes would
prove delusive, and only the labor movement could save them. “Unless a
million men can be mobilized for our defense, we are lost!”--so he said
in the first days, and so he said in the last.
As for Sacco, he was even more extreme; shut up in his half-dark cell
in Dedham jail, he was like a rat in a trap, a creature all of steel
springs and fury. He brooded incessantly, and ate his heart out, and
never let himself be fooled by a hope. “They have got us, they will
kill us,” he would say; and whenever his enemies came near him, he
would throw his revolutionary convictions into their faces. “Viva
l’anarchia!” were his last words, and this summed up his attitude at
every stage of the seven years’ struggle.
III
Cornelia went downtown to have lunch with Henry Cabot Winters, who
knew all the lawyers in town. First he would make the protest which
family proprieties required; and then he would betray his secret
amusement--being in truth rather proud of his runaway mother-in-law,
who was telling the world to go to the devil in the very best “old
Boston” manner.
But this time Cornelia missed the usual twinkle in Henry’s fine dark
eyes. In the first place, the great lawyer was worried by some of the
things he had learned that Jerry Walker had learned about him. And
in the second place, Henry had been shocked by the Wall Street “bomb
explosion.” Five days after the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti a
wagonload of explosives had gone off in front of the building of J.
P. Morgan and Company in New York, and thirty-three persons had been
blown to fragments. The newspapers were certain that this was the work
of anarchists, and the Boston _Traveler_ had come out with a full-page
article, to the effect that the crime had been traced to the Galleani
group, a vengeance for the arrest of the bandits, Sacco and Vanzetti.
“Mother, that is a horrible thing!” said Henry; and Cornelia said, yes,
it was indeed horrible for a newspaper to prejudge the case of two
accused men, and make it impossible for them to get a fair jury in the
community. Henry, as a lawyer, must know that such an article would
have that effect, and under the very strict laws of Massachusetts was
contempt of court.
But Henry did not discuss that aspect of the matter. “I am told,” said
he, “that the Boston anarchists made no attempt to conceal their glee
when they learned of that explosion.”
“Why should they?” said Cornelia. “If they had learned that an
earthquake had destroyed every building in Wall Street, they would
have been still more pleased; but that would not mean they control
earthquakes. Their glee expressed their conviction that the practices
of Wall Street cause boundless suffering to the workers of America; and
in that they are right.”
“Now, Mother,” said Henry, “let’s look at the menu. We don’t want to
get off on politics.”
Cornelia laughed. “I am always entertained to discover the identity of
attitude of my Back Bay and my anarchist friends. The anarchists don’t
want to get off on politics either, they share your faith in direct
action.”
Henry ordered the lunch; and Cornelia repeated what she had learned
from the radical papers, that the explosion had been caused by a
load of blasting gelatine, being illegally taken through the city in
the daytime; while Henry repeated what he had read in the capitalist
papers, that it was an anarchist bomb. He wanted to know, with some
irritation, “Do you think that anarchists never use bombs?”
“I have been told they sometimes do.”
“Yet you can be certain these two friends of yours never did any such
thing?”
“They aren’t accused of having done that, Henry.”
“I know. But people say--”
“What people, Henry?”
“Well, friends of mine who are in position to know the inside.”
“Will you tell me their names?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Did you ask who gave them the information?”
“No, but--”
“I am interested to watch the process of rumor. People say this and
people say that, and always when you try to get something definite,
there is nothing. Can you bring me a single fact, Henry--one that you
as a first-class lawyer would respect? I am ready to deal with it
honestly; and surely it’s worth the family’s while to keep me from
being led into a trap.” Cornelia looked her son-in-law in his dark fine
eyes, gravely and steadily; and he said all right, he would try to help
her.
IV
The waiter brought oysters, since there was an “r” in the month. And
after he had set down the crackers and the lemons and the paprika, and
made all the necessary flourishes, he went his way, and Henry returned
to the dangerous subject of bombs, which haunted the thoughts of all
leisure-class Boston in those desperate days. Despite his pretenses
of omniscience, Cornelia represented his only direct contact with the
anarchist movement.
“You know, Mother, somebody did make bombs--the ones that went through
the mail. You can’t dispute that.”
“No, of course not.”
“What do your friends say about those?”
“Vanzetti is quite certain it was a frame-up.”
“By whom?”
“Some one of the big detective agencies, which are making millions out
of this anti-red agitation.”
Henry smiled pityingly. “You accept that?”
“I don’t accept it as a fact, because I don’t know. I certainly accept
it as a possibility.”
“Believe me, Mother, you’ll have to look for a better alibi. Frame-ups
don’t happen.”
Henry saw the pair of brown eyes fixed upon his dark ones. They
were soft, and always kind, but they were persistent, and he had
learned that they saw deep. “Be careful, and don’t commit yourself
too completely. You may need an alibi yourself, my son.” And that was
hardly fair at the beginning of a luncheon; a poor appetizer for a
great lawyer who was going to be a defendant, and get large daily doses
of his own medicine. His look clouded, and for a while he was less
quick to interrupt.
“Five or six years ago, Henry, I’d have agreed with you about the
frame-up; I’d have said it was a device of criminals in trouble, and
a sign they were hard-pressed. But now I know that the frame-up is a
regular weapon in the class-struggle, just as well understood as, for
example, jury-fixing, or the buying of labor leaders. Did you ever have
William M. Wood for a client?”
“No, Mother, I have never been that fortunate.”
“How rich is he?”
“I don’t know; pretty rich--ten or fifteen million, maybe.”
“Enough to be one of our leading industrialists, the president of our
great woolen corporation. You’d think he was big enough not to frame
up conspiracies against his workers, wouldn’t you? Do you happen to
remember what he did in the Lawrence strike, seven or eight years ago?
He couldn’t see any other way to break the union, so he had dynamite
planted, to be blamed upon the union leaders. He was indicted and tried
for it--”
“And acquitted, if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, you know what it means for a great mill-owner to be acquitted in
his own bailiwick. It is a fact that the men he hired to do the job
were convicted; and I leave it for you to suggest that he didn’t know
what they were doing for him. This much is certain, the story was given
out to the newspapers that dynamite had been found by the police in a
shoe-box in the union headquarters. The box had been brought there by
a detective, and somebody slipped up on the time, and the story was in
the Boston _American_ before the raid took place and the dynamite was
found! That was bad management, at least.”
The great lawyer could not help smiling. “I will say that if I had had
the matter in charge, it wouldn’t have happened that way.”
“Well, don’t forget that it is a part of American labor history, and
graven into the consciousness of all those people you call ‘Reds.’ So
when the great gossip machine starts to grinding, and we hear that
‘people say’ our friends are guilty, that ‘everybody knows it,’ and
that ‘frame-ups don’t happen,’--well, Henry, we fall back on the good
old tradition of English and American law, that every man is innocent
until he is proved guilty. And in the effort to get him a fair trial we
go to a lot of trouble--such as inviting ourselves to lunch with our
rich and famous sons-in-law, and asking for the names of lawyers who
might possibly care about justice!”
V
Henry supplied the names of respectable lawyers, and Cornelia went to
interview them, but in vain. Later on, after years of struggle had
made a world issue of the case, it would be possible to interest great
lawyers in it; but at present there was no man who would burden himself
with the defense of two anarchist infidel draft-dodgers accused of
murder.
Also Henry named some of the legal tricksters, and Cornelia had curious
experiences interviewing these. There was one uniform objection to
all these powerful ones, the amount of money necessary to start their
powers into action. Some said fifty thousand, some said seventy-five;
and this was a stage in the life of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense
Committee when there were discussions as to whether they could afford
to rent a post-office box, and whether it would be the part of wisdom
to buy a second-hand typewriter.
Later on there would be ladies of wealth and fashion interested in the
case, and money would be pouring in from labor groups all over the
world; but at this stage, when money would really have counted, the