Boston a novel
unfortunate,” she commented, “that Rupert has to be mixed up in this
Elevated scandal right now.”
“But that is part of the fight,” said Henry; he explained that Joe
Pelletier had taken up the scandal and was threatening prosecutions,
as a means of frightening Rupert and the rest of the Pilgrim National
crowd. Something like half the patriotic legislators of Massachusetts
had been borrowing money from the banks, and speculating in Elevated
stocks, before they passed the bill which boosted these stocks on the
market; and now Pelletier was trying to fasten it on Rupert. It was a
question which would “beat the other to it.” “Make your bets!” said
Henry Cabot Winters.
“Your smile is a sufficient betting tip!” replied his mother-in-law;
and he said yes, it was coming out all right, only Rupert was the
worrying temperament, and getting worse. The doctors tried to get him
to stop, but they hadn’t chosen a very helpful way. They took x-ray
pictures of his veins and showed how they looked like white ribbons,
which meant deposits of lime and other minerals; they had given the
poor fellow such a list of things he mustn’t eat that when he dined
out he picked around in his plate like a chicken. His rosy and purple
bulges would soon be turned into hollows.
X
Alice’s castle in Bohemia collapsed. Did one of the Thornwell men
convey to the tempestuous genius the information that the Thornwell
ladies had no money of their own? Anyhow, the celebrated artist
discovered a series of concert engagements in California, and wrote
Alice a letter of great wisdom and sympathy. The tormented woman died
a score of soul-deaths, and retired to a fashionable sanatorium to
try a rest cure with “stuffing.” A little later she would be trying a
fasting-cure, and after that a diet of grapes exclusively, and then she
would be paying thirty dollars an hour to have her troubles listened to
by a psychoanalyst.
Meantime Cornelia had hurried back to Dedham, where the trial had
reopened, regardless of Thornwell family troubles. Again she sat
all day on a hard bench in the court-room, and wrote memoranda in
a notebook, and in the evening conferred with the lawyers and the
committee and the journalists until late at night. Each afternoon,
after court, she went by special favor of the sheriff, to say a few
words to Bart, and hear his advice about the procedure, and comfort
him with affection.
The prosecution had come now to the identification of Vanzetti as one
of the bandits. They put on the stand a man named Levangie, gateman at
the railroad tracks across which the bandit car had passed immediately
after the shooting. This old man told how a train was coming when the
car drove up, and he started to put down the gates, but the bandits
forced him at the point of a revolver to raise them and let the car
cross ahead of the train. He identified Vanzetti as the driver of the
car.
When the defense had its turn it put on a locomotive fireman, not a Red
but an Irishman, who testified that three-quarters of an hour after
the shooting he talked with Levangie, who said that he did not see the
bandits, all he saw was the gun, and he “ducked into the shanty.” Three
other witnesses gave the same testimony. As it happened, Levangie had
told one of the defense lawyers that he could not identify the bandits,
and first he admitted having said this; later he contradicted himself,
and said he did not remember any such interview. He was a loose-jointed
fellow, shifty of eye, and did not seem at all abashed when he was
caught in false statements; rather he took the whole affair as a joke.
It became a joke to all the world, when the district attorney came to
discuss Levangie’s testimony in his address to the jury. Mr. Katzmann
was in a dilemma, because the gateman had identified Vanzetti as the
driver of the car, whereas Mr. Katzmann’s other witnesses agreed upon
the driver as young, small, light-haired and sickly looking. The
district attorney managed very ingeniously to repudiate Levangie while
at the same time asking the jury to accept him. The gateman thought he
had seen Vanzetti driving the car, but really he had seen him in the
rear seat!
That was all the real evidence they had. But to cover the weakness,
they put on some more that looked like evidence. A man named Dolbeare,
who thought he had seen Vanzetti in an auto full of foreigners in South
Braintree, some five hours before the crime. He had seen a car going
past him, and what had attracted his attention was one man leaning
forward talking to another, and that it was a “tough-looking bunch.”
He did not know Vanzetti, had never seen him before, and never saw
him again until after the arrest. He admitted that carloads of workmen
drove through the town all the time, on the way to the shipyards. He
could not identify any other man in the car, nor give a single detail
about any one; all he could do was to identify Vanzetti as one man who
had been in that car.
And then a man who claimed to have seen Vanzetti on a train the morning
of the crime, coming from Plymouth to East Braintree. This man was
completely refuted by the conductor and three ticket-agents--no ticket
had been sold for such a journey. Also the prosecution put on another
crossing-tender, who had noted a car at his crossing, near the Manley
Woods, an hour after the crime, and thought it was Vanzetti in the
front seat of the car. And that was all the identification! That was
the main part of the evidence upon which the august Commonwealth of
Massachusetts proposed to send a man to the electric chair!
When Cornelia examined her notes, and questioned others in her party,
to see if her memory was playing her false, she was appalled by the
thing she saw happening before her eyes. They were actually attempting
to convict Bart of murder without one real item of identification;
solely upon such facts as that he had been with Sacco the night of
the arrest, and had a gun and cartridges, and had told lies to the
police about himself and his doings! So farcical was the identification
of Bart, and so completely were the identifications of Nick shot to
pieces in the course of time, that three years later Judge Thayer
found himself backed against the wall, and forced to admit that
“these verdicts did not rest, in my judgment, upon the testimony of
the eye-witnesses.” This news would certainly have surprised the
gentlemen of the jury, who had spent a week or two listening to these
eye-witnesses, and had been solemnly assured by the district attorney
himself that never in his eleven years of office had he “laid eye or
given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews!”
XI
Almost three weeks it took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to present
its case against the two anarchist wops. Thirty times the prisoners
emerged from the county jail--at a quarter to nine every morning except
Sunday, and again at a quarter to two every afternoon except Saturday
and Sunday--and marched from the jail to the court-house: chained to
a deputy on each side, with ten or twelve policemen marching in front,
and as many in the rear. They always walked in the street, not on the
sidewalk, for greater safety against surprise attack. Small boys would
gather to stare, and the deputies would command, “Stand back!” It was
their only chance to justify the expense to the county.
Seated in the cage, side by side, the prisoners would gaze straight
before them. They could not see the spectators, nor was any one
permitted to speak to them, except their lawyers. After a time the
stern guards learned to make an exception of Mrs. Sacco, who would go
to the cage and chat with her husband until court opened. Poor little
woman, she had to bring a nursing baby with her, and her face, usually
bright and eager, was worn and lined. She would sit all day, silent and
rigid, trying to understand long words in a language that was still
partly alien to her.
Her husband also would try, and the more he understood, the hotter
became his revolutionary fury. Several times he and his companion
boiled over--impossible to sit in silence while lies were told and
rascality committed under the forms of law. When the policeman who
had arrested them swore that Bart had several times started to reach
for his gun, Bart cried out, “You are a liar!” A terrible breach
of decorum--the guards seized him and shoved him into his seat,
commanding, “Shut up!” When Lola Andrews was in the midst of her
identification, Sacco rose in his seat and cried, “Am I the man? Take a
good look! I am myself!” Again a great shock, and a sensational story
for the papers. Nick’s picture took the front page.
Later, when the defense was having its innings, there were more scenes.
The interpreter provided by the court was an Italian by the name of
Rossi; he belonged to the Norfolk County “ring,” and was a friend of
Mrs. DeFalco’s, and of Judge Thayer’s--he had a child named Webster
Thayer Rossi, and he used to drive the judge up to the University Club
in Boston; if the judge did not discuss the case with him on the way,
it was the only chance “Web” ever lost.
Either this Rossi did not know how to interpret correctly, or he did
not wish to; at a critical point in the testimony of Alfonsina Brini,
he misstated in English what she had said in Italian. Bart knew
enough to catch the error, and insisted upon calling attention to
it, and would not let the guards silence him. Again and again he saw
these errors, and to Cornelia, when she came to see him in the jail,
he insisted, “That fellow is a crook!” Over and over he said it, “He
is a crook! Crook!” Cornelia thought it was Bart’s prejudice against
everybody in power; but it was another of those things that were to be
proved too late. Before five years had passed, Rossi was to get a two
year jail sentence for trying to sell his influence with judges.
Such misfortune appeared to dog the patriots who were prosecuting
Sacco and Vanzetti; so many of them got into trouble with their own
laws--but always after the verdict, when it was too late to count!
There was an agent of the Department of Justice, named Shaughnessey,
who had had the job of watching Red meetings and had supplied a mass of
information concerning Sacco and Vanzetti. This ardent patriot stole a
carload of hogs--a rather difficult object to get away with, one would
think. Later he got twelve years for a holdup. But when in the course
of later appeals, the defense had occasion to suggest the possibility
of improper conduct by Department of Justice agents, “Web” Thayer was
outraged by this, and delivered a stern rebuke.
XII
And then Captain Proctor, head of the state police. The Proctor story
was so atrocious, that naïve old ladies like Cornelia Thornwell thought
it would only have to become known in order to split the community wide
open. But in fact, it hardly made a ripple. Massachusetts was so used
to official knavery that it had lost the power to react, even with
surprise.
Captain Proctor had been in the police service of the Commonwealth
some thirty-six years, and was an old hand at the “frame-up”; among
other jobs, he had “made” the Ettor and Giovannitti case. When Sacco
and Vanzetti were arrested, he was called in by Mike Stewart, and
interviewed all the witnesses, and tried to help out Mike’s “theory.”
But in the end he told Mike, “You’ve got the wrong men,” and withdrew
from the case.
But still, gang loyalty held him, and when Fred Katzmann called on him
to identify the so-called “mortal bullet,” which had been extracted
from the body of the dead guard, he came. This bullet was the crucial
issue in the whole case; it was what tied Sacco and Vanzetti to the
case, because the other five bullets found in the dead bodies were