Boston a novel
and prayers and salutes--and one of the street intersections most
frequented by the wealth and fashion of Boston was to be christened
“John Quincy Thornwell Junior Square.” All over the city and in the
suburban towns they were doing this; so that future generations of
tourists would walk down Jones Street, looking for the corner of
Jones and Smith, and would be perplexed to discover that there was no
such place, but that a quite ordinary crossing with a drugstore, an
undertaking parlor, a grocery and a delicatessen shop, was known as
“Michael Callahan O’Grady Square.”
These ceremonies were to take place on May 29th, two days before
the opening of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial at Dedham; and the event
was the subject of a vehement discussion between the great-aunt of
the hero, and his cousin, Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin. Unthinkable
that any relative should fail to attend this ceremony! Cornelia was
going, because she was always hoping to keep peace with the family;
but Betty declared that she preferred to attend a circus, in a last
effort to trace the man with the bullet hole in his overcoat! When
Cornelia argued that “John did give his life for his country,” the new
generation answered, “Don’t talk like a legionnaire! He gave his life
for Father’s bonds. I didn’t want them and I’m not going to get them,
so I can’t see that I owe any reverence to my military cousin.”
“He is dead, Betty--”
“Exactly, and we aren’t helping him by parading behind his corpse.
We are doing it for our own glory, and especially for the young
fellows--so that when Father wants them to protect his bonds again,
they’ll think they are being glorious. It is vicious propaganda for
militarism, and if you who call yourself a pacifist do anything to help
it along--it will simply mean that you’re old and tired, Grannie dear!”
XII
Was it accident, or was it the playful malice of fate, that Memorial
Day fell on a Monday, so that the patriots had two whole days,
preceding the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, to rouse the population
against the Reds? On that Sunday and Monday it was estimated that
at least two hundred thousand Bostonians, one-fifth of the whole
population, took part in ceremonies. The governor and the mayor were
busy all day long, making speeches at breakfasts, luncheons and
banquets, with parades in between, and dedications and unveilings.
Senators and congressmen, councilmen and district attorneys took
a double holiday from stealing, and delivered eloquent praise of
the flag, and denunciations of its foes, the vicious and malicious
“radicals.” There was high mass in hundreds of Catholic churches, with
parades of the Knights of Columbus, and speeches by the biggest and
most successful rascals in Massachusetts. There were memorial services
in Forest Hills Cemetery, with nine hundred veterans of the Grand Army
of the Republic decorating graves. There were religious services in
Fenway Park, with veterans of three wars forming in Copley Square,
and loud-speakers installed so that huge throngs might hear. The Park
Street Church unveiled a tablet, with names of the members who had
given their lives in the World War. The Elks paraded, and had a bugler
sounding taps. The oldest veterans, too feeble even to put wreaths on
graves, were taken in launches, to strew flowers on the bay in honor of
the unknown dead.
All over the Commonwealth the same thing went on; no community too
small to have its heroes and its memories. Flag poles were set up and
monuments unveiled. Quincy, the largest city in Norfolk County, from
which the Sacco-Vanzetti jury was to be drawn, dedicated three squares
to its dead. One man had been killed in the Spanish War, another in an
uprising in the Philippines; many years they had spent in the land of
the shades without distinction, but now they were called up--on the
day before two anarchist bandits went to trial! The first Quincy boy
killed in the Civil War was resurrected for honors--sixty years he had
been forgotten! In Bridgewater, scene of the crime for which Vanzetti
was in prison, the remains of a World War veteran brought back from
France were buried with solemn ceremonials; in Braintree, scene of the
second crime, another body was buried, with the whole population in
attendance--a parade, and speeches by officials, with the selectmen and
other great persons standing by with bared heads. Another in Quincy,
another in Weymouth--with banners furled, and muffled drums, and
soldiers firing a salute over the grave.
A storm of patriotic fervor, a torrent of eloquence, in support of
America, and in denunciation of her foes; hundreds of thousands of
patient people, standing reverently in the spring sunshine; millions of
the same kind reading about it in editions of a dozen great newspapers;
and only one circumstance to mar the perfection of the double
holiday--the fact that the papers were obliged to print details of
several scandals then in the midst of exploding with a frightful stink.
The attorney general of the Commonwealth had just filed charges against
the district attorney of Middlesex County, just across the river
from Boston, charging him with having blackmailed a group of leading
moving picture producers of something over a hundred thousand dollars,
the price of immunity for a “Nero’s Circus” which they had held in a
roadhouse. The papers were full of lurid details about naked girls
dancing the highland fling; they said that several leading politicians
and criminal lawyers of Boston had shared in the loot.
Also the state bank commissioner was digging into the matter of the
bribery of legislators revealed by the recent bank failures; and it
was an embarrassing fact that many patriotic orators of this double
holiday had been sharing in such graft. The public did not know it,
but the orators knew it, so they pounded the rostrum, and waved their
arms until their faces grew purple and the sweat dissolved the starch
in their collars; the loud-speakers bellowed, and the parks and
public places, the churches and temples and banquet halls resounded
with sentiments of seraphic idealism, voiced by persons whose social
functions were those of hogs in a trough.
XIII
It was not so bad at the ceremony which Cornelia attended; because that
was Thornwell, and you may be sure the clan saw to it that no person
tainted with scandal did any orating at John Quincy Thornwell Junior
Square. The clan knew--for were they not the paymasters? The mayor of
the city happened to be a blue-blood that year--a rare interval of
respectability. And if the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth was to
go directly from the governor’s chair to the vice-presidency of one of
Rupert’s banks, and soon after having appointed two of Rupert’s very
good friends to the supreme judicial bench--well, that was a scandal
of such colossal proportions that it became respectable. Men could not
face the implications of it, so it was not discussed, except by a few
insiders, and members of the rival banking group, who knew what Rupert
was after.
A grand stand had been built, and flags and bunting made the
consecrated square into a child’s dream of peppermint candy. Lines of
ropes and policemen kept the throngs back; and there came “Captain
John’s” own Battery A, khaki-clad, with rumble of guns and tramp of
horses, and fluttering of pennants, red field, with figures in yellow.
And the infantry, known as the “Cadets,” in long blue trousers with
yellow stripes. There came a hundred Grand Army veterans, pitiful old
boys in every stage of decrepitude, carrying their tattered battle
flags, and wearing their faded blue uniforms, covered with medals and
decorations. There came khaki-clad veterans of American Legion posts,
and the Boy Cadets, their faces newly washed and shining. There came
automobiles full of great personages in braided broadcloth suits and
shiny top hats, and ladies in costly chiffons and new spring bonnets.
A beautiful show; with rolling of drums and blowing of bugles, and
standing up and sitting down again, and baring heads and bowing them,
while the rector of Trinity Church in the City of Boston offered an
invocation to the God of Battles, and His Son, the Prince of Peace. War
and Peace were thus mixed up in the ceremony, so that nobody could tell
at any moment which was which. The orators declared that the way to
insure peace was to prepare for war; upon which program the nations had
just led themselves into the greatest war to end war in all history,
and now were spending several times as much money to prepare for an
even greater war to end war.
It would be safe to say that in that vast throng of cheering and
singing and reverently listening people, these traitor-thoughts found
lodgment in only one head, that of the little old lady who sat in the
front row, among the highest of the high-up dignitaries. She, the widow
of a former governor, a Thornwell, and the great-aunt of the hero,
could not have been denied her proper place without making a scandal,
and emphasizing the dreadful rumors that she had been seduced by the
enemy within our gates, and turned into a friend of bomb throwers and
bandits. So nice to look upon, with her hair now almost white, and her
little round face much wrinkled, but still jolly, and her new spring
costume selected and presented by her daughter Alice of impeccable
taste; so gentle in manner, so quiet and ladylike--it was impossible to
believe what everybody knew about her, that she was actually going down
to Dedham the next day, and face all the uproar and notoriety, and lend
her sanction to the defense of desperate anarchists on trial for their
lives.
She watched with tears in her eyes, while her great-grandniece, the
little daughter of the dead hero, came forward to draw the veil from
the bronze tablet. The bugles blew, and the audience rose and bared
its head, and the bands started to play “America,” and everybody
sang--a sublime moment. The lovely young widow of the hero had to
hide her face in her hands, and even the stolid James Scatterbridge
and the cynical Henry Cabot Winters and the stately Rupert Alvin were
not ashamed to be moved. Cornelia’s tears were right and proper, and
she kept her traitor-thoughts to herself. No one guessed that she was
weeping for other heroes who were still to die. For the little boys in
their khaki uniforms, lifting their shining faces to the orators and
the beautiful waving flags! For the mothers who brought them there, to
be consecrated and pledged to future slaughters! For the great humble
masses who packed the streets in every direction, and stood bareheaded
and trusting, gazing up to the great ones, and believing every word the
loud-speakers told them!
A sharp division in that audience, between the many who believed, and
the few who knew. To the former the name America, and its symbol,
the flag, meant liberty and justice for all mankind; while to the
few it meant private property in land, machinery and credit, and the
exploitation of labor based thereon. By means of this system, the
knowing ones had brought the lesser nations and weaker peoples into
debt to them; so America and the flag meant battleships and guns and
airplanes and poison gas to collect this tribute to all eternity. That
was the reason these busy gentlemen took two days off from business,
and built stands and tacked up decorations, and set up loud-speakers
to carry the words of politicians and priests and preachers to crowds
in the public squares. That was why you heard no patriotic address
which failed to mention the “enemy within our gates,” the vicious
and criminal “Reds” who refused to love America and appreciate her
ideals, but wanted to overthrow the greatest government in the world,
and repudiate all the debts, and nationalize all the women, and make