Boston a novel
raising tens of thousands of dollars--no one could say how much, but
they guessed high, and every dollar was a separate outrage and insult;
a refusal to play the game according to the rules.
Lee Swenson knew the danger into which he had put his clients by the De
Falco procedure, and this thought was a goad which gave him no rest.
He was a cyclone of energy; writing circulars, or suggesting ideas
for others to write; printing appeals, getting lists for mailing,
writing to this person and that, to get information, to pull wires for
publicity, money, or support; interviewing witnesses, hunting up new
ones, probing this or that detail of their lives. He would come out to
dine with Cornelia, and sit in her big Morris chair by the window, and
fan himself and sigh with exhaustion; but in a few minutes he would be
telling about a new idea, and before long something else would pop into
his head, and out would come his notebook, and what was supposed to be
a memorandum might turn into a new set of campaign plans.
Another lawyer had come, a friend of Swenson’s from the west; Fred
Moore, an Irishman, but a radical, and Swenson’s aide in many a fight.
Also there were two more journalists on the staff, John Nicholas Beffel
and Eugene Lyons, devoted young fellows, passionately convinced of
the justice of the cause, and writing newspaper and magazine stuff
that went all over the world. As an investigator, there was Bob
Reid, a Boston constable, gray old veteran who had been through the
Ettor-Giovannitti case with Swenson, and could follow the trail of
the authorities like an Indian hunter. If there was anything about
Massachusetts police practice too dreadful for Cornelia to believe, all
she had to do was to ask this man, and he would cauterize her doubts.
And then another figure, still more alarming to a lady who had lived a
sheltered life; a figure out of the underworld, furtive-eyed, silent--a
man whom Swenson or Moore usually saw alone, and with whom they made
mysterious appointments. Lee, it appeared, was going to try the “stool
pigeon” methods of the authorities. Somebody had actually committed
the South Braintree crime, he insisted, and the Bridgewater one, too;
the way to nail down the prosecution was to find the guilty men. A
rumor had come to Lee that in a city not far away from Boston there
was a gang of real bandits who were driving an automobile which they
called, jeeringly, “Sacco’s car.” Now the lawyers were spending money
to trail this gang, and Cornelia began to hear whispers of dread names.
Lee Swenson saw himself playing the “lead” in a fifth act, in which the
prosecution would be confronted with the real evidence, so overwhelming
that truth would be vindicated and justice done.
Lee was much of a boy, in spite of his forty years, and he managed to
communicate this excitement to Betty and Joe and Cornelia. But he found
it impossible to get the Italians of the committee to share his idea;
as in the De Falco case, it was contrary to “filosofia anarchica.” When
you argued about it, you would meet shrugs of the shoulders; let the
cops do their own dirty work. “We no raise money for sooch job.” When
you declared that here might be real bandits, there would be a still
higher shrug of the shoulders, a wider sweep of the hands. “What if
they did? Is poor feller, musta live. Is victim of wicked sistema, what
right I got for punish?”
And when you took the question to Bart and Nick, you met exactly the
same response. They would not be saved at the expense of any other
human being; they would not compromise their principles, even to prove
their innocence. The business of anarchists was to end the system of
exploitation, after which crime would cease of itself. If you could
live according to these principles, all right, then live; if you could
not, then it was up to you to die. Such stubbornness was embarrassing
to persons of Yankee upbringing, who believed in adjusting means to
ends, and took “law and order” seriously. Also embarrassing to a
lawyer, who had spent twenty years training himself to play a certain
game, and now was expected to play it and not play it at the same time!
III
Day by day, as the work continued, the intricacies of the case
developed. The list of witnesses for the prosecution numbered more
than fifty, those for the defense close to one hundred. There were
not investigators enough to run down all the clews, there were not
cells enough in the human brain to hold all the details. The crime
had occurred in mid-afternoon, on a busy street, and there were many
witnesses, each one a separate problem; the more you dug into him or
her, the more extra problems you would discover--husbands, wives,
sweethearts, children, employers--to say nothing of policemen and
investigators and prosecuting officials who had been there before you!
The witnesses were mostly persons of low social station, the neglected
poor of America. To probe into their lives, to uncover their family
skeletons, their vices and secret shames, their greeds and fears and
vanities and hates--it seemed to Cornelia there was nothing so horrible
being done in all the world. Except, perhaps, the work which a large
force of Americans, guided by sentimentality and superstition, were now
performing in France; digging up the dead bodies of soldier boys who
had been slain in battle, and had been rotting underground for three
years.
Take the soul of Lola Andrews. Cornelia lived with the soul of Lola
Andrews for months, walked, talked, ate, slept, dined or fasted with
Lola Andrews; because Betty took Lola for her task, consecrating her
youth and beauty, her social charm, her faith, hope and charity, to the
task of trying to persuade Lola to tell the truth. Naturally Betty,
being new at the practice of psychopathology, not very well informed
as to the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria, paranoia, hyperesthesia
and all abnormalities, would bring her problems to Grannie, and the two
would hold long consultations, and Cornelia would visit the famous Dr.
Morrow and ask his advice.
Lola Andrews had begun life in the wilderness of Maine, as the hapless
child of an Italian man and a Yankee farmer’s daughter. Her mother
died, her father disappeared, and she grew up, slim and small, black
of eyes and hair, a kind of woodland sprite, used to the sneers of the
world. At the age of seventeen, when she was married, her hair was
such a mat of filth and vermin that her husband had been compelled to
take her to a barber and have her head shaved close. This husband was
a soldier returned from the Philippines; after a child was born, Lola
began running out to dances, and he left her. During years of misery
she made the discovery that by screaming and crying she could get
people to pay attention to her; so she became an hysteric, and at any
time during the investigation, if anything happened that Lola didn’t
like, up would go her hands and forth would come a shriek. After which,
she would calm down, and talk quite reasonably about her own interests.
At the time of the South Braintree crime Lola had been taking care of
an elderly man who was bedridden, in the hope that he would leave her a
part of his property at his death. Meantime, since he gave her nothing,
she scrubbed floors, she went out and did washing--and of course was
preyed upon. The police of the town knew about her life, yet in this
case they would be willing to make use of her.
It was Lola’s story that she had been walking down the street, four
hours prior to the crime, and had twice passed what she thought was the
bandit car. It was a great weakness of the prosecution that the crime
had taken place at such speed, there had been only a minute or so for
observation; but here was Lola, who had stopped and chatted with the
bandits. One of the two men standing by the car was yellow-haired--and
when Joe Randall heard this part of the story he said, “Look out, Lee
Swenson, they are after you!” The other man had been under the car,
doing something to the works, and this was the one Lola had made a
special point to observe, and was willing to describe in any way that
seemed most to the advantage of Lola.
So here was a problem in applied psychology; to explore the dark
caverns of this tortured soul, to know more about her than she knew
about herself, so that you could pull the strings and manipulate her
to the ends of “joostice.” But alas, it was easier to dream than to
accomplish; the science of psychopathology is still in its infancy, and
the few months’ time allowed was insufficient to bring it to maturity.
Lola would have moods of frankness; she was nearing forty now, her
charms were gone, she was a poor wreck, and this was her chance to get
what was coming to her; the world was a place of “dog eat dog,” and why
should she worry about a pair of wops who would never worry about her?
Why should she worry about what she had said at preliminary hearings,
or to newspaper reporters, or investigators, or any of the other people
who had pestered her? All she had to do was deny it, and the district
attorney would protect her, and the jury would believe her.
There was a secret spring by which the soul of Lola might be moved,
but alas, the defense did not find it until after the trial. The
fates so willed it, that everything that was really significant in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case was not found until after the trial. Lola’s son
was living up in Maine, under another name, and in the effort to keep
his esteem, she would make sacrifices--for a few days. When confronted
with this son, and his reminder of other cases where she had “staged
a show,” Lola broke down and admitted that she had lied, and that her
identification had been “framed.” She made affidavit to this in the
presence of her son and several reliable witnesses. But under police
pressure, she took it all back, and made another affidavit, with a
lurid tale about how the defense had intimidated her. Subsequently she
took that back also.
Such was Lola Andrews, who sat in the witness chair at the trial, and
identified Sacco as the “dark-complexioned man” who had been under
the car, and identified the car as the bandit car because, “when I
heard of the shooting I somehow associated the man I saw at the car.”
And when the defense started to question her about her past life, she
suddenly threw her much-tried fainting stunt, and Judge Thayer hastened
to adjourn court. When she was asked the cause of her excitement, she
said it was because she had recognized in the court-room a man who had
assaulted her in a toilet in Quincy! And Judge Thayer, who had no more
training in psychopathology than Cornelia and Betty, ordered all the
doors of the court-room closed, while the officers attempted to catch
the man whom Lola had recognized. Never had she had so much attention,
never had she been such a heroine!
Along with this problem came Mrs. Campbell, the elderly woman who had
been with Lola on the day of the crime, and had gone into the shoe
factory with her to seek a job. It took fancy detective work to locate
Mrs. Campbell, because she was not listed by the prosecution; when she
was found, the reason was apparent--she completely wiped Lola out.
The man they had spoken to was not the man under the car at all, but
a man in khaki clothes standing near the factory; neither of them had
spoken to any man who was working on an automobile. An investigator for
the government had come to Mrs. Campbell, and hearing her story, had
assured her there was no need for her to come to Dedham to testify,
what she knew was of no importance, and it would cost too much money to
bring her. It would have added ten or twenty dollars to the seventy
thousand which the great Commonwealth was spending to put two wops out
of the way.