Boston a novel
came clear out to my home in Worcester and assured me that the Italian
Government had no interest in this case!”
The reporters, seeing that he was in a mood for talk, gathered round.
One of them spoke of Fred Moore, with whom the judge had been arguing
all morning over the selection of jurors. The old man’s face showed
that there was still life in it; his yellow parchment skin became
suffused with blood. “What do you suppose that fellow wanted me to ask
those veniremen? ‘Are you a member of a labor union? Are you opposed to
union labor? Are you a member of a secret society?’”
“Web” went on, his conversation turning into a stump speech, as it
always did, in a dining room or a railroad train, on a football field
or a golf green, whenever he could get an audience. “Did you ever
see a case in which so many leaflets have been broadcast saying that
people couldn’t get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts?” He
looked at Joe Randall, for he knew that Joe was the wicked author of
these leaflets. His voice rose high and shrill, and his hands shook as
he waved them. John Nicholas Beffel, annoyed at the turn of events,
stepped closer and said, “I wish to inform you, Judge Thayer, that
the statement of the Marquis Ferrante was given out at his express
request. He asked me to copy it and give it to the other newspapermen.”
But the old man brushed him aside and as he went out, shook his fist,
exclaiming to the group of men: “You wait till I give my charge to the
jury. I’ll show ’em!”
The reporters stood, dumbfounded. A judge, actually then sitting on the
case, going back to court in that mood, to deal with men on trial for
their lives! Manifestly, it was a “big story,” and if the newspapermen
could have had their way, unhampered by owners, it would have taken
the front page of every newspaper in Massachusetts. But newspapermen
do not have their way; they do have owners, and have to practice what
is known as “taking policy.” The representative of the Associated
Press, Jack Harding, advanced the classic formula of his organization,
that the matter was “controversial,” and therefore not to be handled.
“Controversial,” in the sense of the Associated Press, means anything
detrimental to the ruling class of America. It is manifest that members
of this class, being all in office or high station of some sort, can
speak, and have their utterances count as news of an important and
dignified character. It is when their enemies attack them that the
“controversy” begins.
The other reporters from the capitalist papers agreed to hush up the
incident. Beffel and Joe Randall might break step if they wanted to;
but they could only publish the story in a few labor and socialist
papers, where it would count for nothing; and they would get themselves
barred from the private dining room, and from the precious “inside
dope.” The defense counsel agreed that nothing could be done; but of
course the story went up to Boston, and caused several lawyers and
judges of the city to say that “Web” had gone mad, and that something
ought to be done about it--only, alas, nothing could be done, because
all the judges, and even the court employees of Massachusetts are
appointed for life, and if you were to try to impeach “Web” in the
midst of this case, you might just as well turn the Commonwealth over
to the Reds and be done with it.
IV
The prisoners sat in their steel cage, gazing about with anxious eyes,
trying to understand the complex procedure in a strange tongue: Bart
with his heavy drooping mustaches, his melancholy face now deeply
lined; Nick, restless-eyed, impatient; both of them pale with a year
away from sunshine. They were neatly shaved, brushed and washed,
dressed in new suits, with black silk ties and clean collars--doing
their best to look like Americans, to impress an American jury. They
gazed at the elderly stern-faced men who were to decide their fate:
not one foreigner among them, all English names, old Yankee ancestry.
Every one on that jury had had a son or near relative in France--and
those relatives who were not dead or crippled had been marching in the
patriotic celebrations of the last few days.
Assistant District Attorney Williams arose and made a speech to the
jury, telling what his side intended to prove. Once more Cornelia
listened to that story about a bandit gang, about Boda and Orciani and
Coacci, the bandit house and the little shed behind it, the Buick car
with the bullet hole in the side, the little Overland car in which the
bandits had escaped, after they had “thrown away” the Buick car in the
Manley woods. The jury would be taken downstairs to inspect the Buick;
they would be taken on a tour, Judge Thayer accompanying, to see the
shack and the shed. Cornelia had heard all this at Plymouth, and had
seen the prosecution fail to produce any evidence whatever. She had
not yet learned about Mike Stewart and his “theory,” derived from the
“detective machine”; the whole procedure seemed to her a lunatic’s
dream, and she watched in a daze to see what would happen in the course
of this second trial.
Exactly the same thing happened as at Plymouth; no evidence appeared.
The farce became so apparent that even Judge Thayer could not stand for
it. As to Boda he said, late in the trial: “But he is not connected in
any way with the murder. Anybody else driving a Buick car, if it was a
seven-passenger car, would stand almost in the same relationship....
But there is not one identifying feature.” He forced the prosecution
to admit that “Neither Orciani nor Boda was in South Braintree at
the time of the murder and there was no concert of action between
them and Sacco and Vanzetti as to the murder.” He ordered that “all
evidence obtained by the jury on the view at the Coacci barn or shed
be entirely disregarded.” But of course it wasn’t disregarded, and the
prosecution knew what it had fixed in the jury’s mind. Even after the
district attorney had expressly admitted that Orciani was not one of
the murderers, he brought him up before the jury as a dark and sinister
mystery, challenging the defense to explain why they had not put him on
the stand.
Physicians described the wounds of the dead men; and then came the
identification witnesses. Lewis L. Wade, a shoe worker, had thought
in the Brockton police station that Sacco was one of the bandits; but
now he said he was not sure. It was a blow to the police, and as Wade
left the stand, one of the officers called him a “piker,” and another
muttered, “We are not through with you yet.” A few weeks later Wade
lost his job--after seventeen years’ service with the shoe company. Two
others who testified for the defense met the same fate. Not all the
dangers were on one side!
There came Mary Splaine, bookkeeper of the shoe company, who had run
to the window and looked out. Mary was one of the victims of that
process of suggestion which prosecuting officials understand well. She
had looked at Sacco so many times that she saw him as the bandit; she
sat and looked at him once more and described him in minute detail,
height, weight, square shoulders, high forehead, hair brushed back and
between two and two and a half inches long; “dark hair, dark eyebrows,
thin cheeks and clean-shaven face of a peculiar greenish-white.” No
one could have asked a better identification--until you considered
the opportunity which Mary had had to see the bandit. Then you
realized that she was claiming a physical impossibility. She was in
a second-story window, eighty feet from the car, and she saw the
bandit for the length of time it took the car to travel thirty-five
feet at eighteen miles per hour--one or two seconds, amid the wildest
excitement and shooting.
The defense confronted Mary with the record of what she had said at
the preliminary hearing, after three different examinations of Sacco,
“I do not think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the
man.” Now, surprised and confused, she said, “That is not true. I
never said it.” Having a day to think it over, and to be warned that
stenographer’s notes are not to be so easily waved aside, she took the
stand and corrected her testimony, admitting that she had said what was
in the record, but claiming that she had changed upon “reflection.”
The defense tried desperately to break Mary Splaine; but she was one
of those covered by the tragic phrase, too late! For her they needed
the Pinkerton reports--the evidence of the operative Henry Hellyer, who
was in court, and whose knowledge was in possession of the prosecution.
He and Captain Proctor, of the state police--another witness, also in
court--had shown Mary Splaine a photograph of a criminal called “Tony
the Wop,” and Mary had positively identified him as one of the bandits;
so the police had set out to get him--and learned that he had been in
jail at the time of the crime! Also Mary Splaine had told Hellyer a
long story about two men in the factory who had plotted and carried
out the banditry. Mary gave their names, and Hellyer made “discreet
inquiries” of the owner of the factory, who said the accusation was
baseless; the superintendent told him to pay no attention to Mary
Splaine, “because she is one of the most irresponsible persons he ever
came in contact with.” So read the report of “H.H.,” hidden from the
defense until five or six years later.
V
Next came Louis Pelzer, not bright, son of two mutes: the Jewish boy,
haunted by the memory of pogroms, and in terror of the police. He had
peered out through a window, and amid flying bullets had written down
the number of the bandit car, and made note of the bandit so exactly
that he could describe even the pin in his collar. The defense lawyers
took this pitiful creature in hand, and soon had him mopping the sweat
from his forehead. It became evident that he could not understand
simple questions, and tangled himself in lie after lie. Yes, he had
lied to Robert Reid, investigator for the defense; he had said he did
not see anything, because he did not want to be a witness. The defense
put on three fellow-workmen of Pelzer’s, two of whom testified that
instead of putting up the window to look, he had dived under a bench
when he heard the shooting. The third testified, “I heard him say that
he did not see anybody.” The district attorney did the best he could in
defending Pelzer to the jury. “He was frank enough here, gentlemen, to
own that he had twice falsified before to both sides, and he gave you
his reason.... He is big enough and manly enough now to tell you of his
prior falsehoods and his reasons for them.”
And then the Lola Andrews circus. Three days of the expensive time of
the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was given up to
Lola. She told her tale of how, four hours prior to the crime, she had
seen two men with a car drawn up by the curb, and how she had talked
to them, and the one under the car was Sacco. When the defense began
to go into the details of her past life, she fainted impressively,
and Judge Thayer ordered the court-room barricaded, so that when Lola
was restored, she might pick out the man who had assaulted her in
a toilet in a Quincy rooming-house. But that man was apparently an
adept in the occult lore of the Hindoos, and possessed the power to
dematerialize his body and disappear through the walls of court-rooms;
the police could not catch him--but Lola won time to think, and also
she won the jury, and Judge Thayer to keep the defense from asking her
bad questions. When Fred Moore spoke of her testimony as “hopelessly
confusing,” the judge gave him a stern rebuke. “That is an unfair
criticism of any witness.”
When the defense had its chance, it put on Mrs. Julia Campbell, who had
accompanied Lola on that visit to the shoe factory to look for a job,