Boston a novel
of such a size and make that they could not have come through either
Sacco’s pistol or Vanzetti’s. The prosecution claimed that the “mortal
bullet” had been fired from Sacco’s pistol, and could have been fired
from no other pistol. They put on an “expert” who swore to that; and
then they put on Proctor, who backed up the “expert.”
At least, that is what everybody thought he did, and the trial was
concluded on that basis; the prosecution laid the utmost emphasis
upon it, because Captain Proctor had qualified at great length as an
authority upon bullets and revolvers, who had been studying the matter
for twenty years, and had been a witness in more than a hundred capital
cases. Said Katzmann, in his closing argument to the jury, “You might
disregard all the identification testimony, and base your verdict on
the testimony of these experts.” And Judge Thayer put the weight of
his judicial authority behind that; he explained to the jury what the
testimony meant, that “it was Sacco’s pistol that fired the bullet
that caused the death of Berardelli. To this effect the Commonwealth
introduced the testimony of two witnesses, Messrs. Proctor and Van
Amburgh.”
Nothing could be more positive; and so the matter went to the jury; so
it stood in the minds of all students of the case for two years. But
then Captain Proctor was near death, and his conscience troubled him;
two men whom he believed to be innocent stood in the shadow of the
electric chair, because of a conspiracy into which he had entered with
the prosecution, to misrepresent his testimony to the jury. So he made
an affidavit in which he set forth what had happened. Repeatedly he had
been asked by the prosecutors to testify that the particular mortal
bullet had been fired through the particular pistol belonging to Sacco.
He had made many tests and measurements in the effort to convince
himself that this was so, but he could not get the proof, and refused
to give such testimony. “The district attorney desired to ask me that
question, but I had repeatedly told him that if he did I should be
obliged to answer in the negative.” At the trial the questioning had
been done by the assistant district attorney, later to become a learned
judge. His question had been framed very carefully, and Proctor’s
answer no less carefully: “My opinion is that it is consistent with
being fired by that pistol.”
A verbal trick, you see; the witness meant that the mortal bullet
_might_ have been fired through that pistol; but the district attorney
represented to the jury that his words meant something entirely
different--that it _must_ have been fired through that pistol, and
could not have been fired through any other pistol in the world.
That was how Judge Thayer passed it on to the jury in his charge;
and in after years, with the printed words of his charge before
him--preserved immutably, to be handed down to the scorn and fury of
all future times--the embittered old man rendered a decision in which
he ingeniously twisted the defense contentions concerning the meaning
of the Proctor affidavit and the answering affidavits of Katzmann and
his assistants, which really did not answer at all.
It was “Web’s” way, shown in almost every decision he rendered. You
would state something in plain words, as explicitly as the language
permitted; you would wait patiently, a year or two, while the old
gentleman had an appendicitis operation and an attack of pneumonia; and
finally he would hand down a decision in which he accused you of having
said many things you had never thought of. He would set up a whole
regiment of straw-men, and in a valiant duel chop off their heads; he
would fill pages in the stately law-books with refutations of arguments
which had never been heard anywhere save in his own hate-tormented
head. And then at the very end, sitting upon his throne with the whole
world for an audience, he would solemnly declare: “With reference to
the question of prejudice, there is not any now and there never was
any.”
CHAPTER XIV
JUDGE FURY
I
Four times each day the prisoners made their march down the middle of
the street, accompanied by military escort. Four times each day the
jury made a march, from their hotel to the court-house, at noon to a
restaurant and back, then to the hotel in the evening: twelve “good
men and true,” with court officers preceding and following, the aged
foreman toddling at their head--he was to die within three months.
It was a heavy strain upon old men, to sit for six hours a day in a
crowded court-room, in suffocating midsummer heat. The judge mercifully
said they might take off their coats, but their Puritan consciences
required most of them to be uncomfortable!
Seven weeks their semi-imprisonment lasted; the bored victims got to
know one another too well, and when they were tired of playing cards
they sought refuge in the daily newspaper. They were not allowed to
read, about their own case--the sheriff cut it all out of the papers;
but they read about a court up in Boston, where Charles Ponzi was being
punished for having made five million dollars without permission of
the Federal Reserve Board. The financial wizard’s digestion had been
wrecked by the ordeal of law, so the papers explained, and he had to
be taken out to a restaurant each day, to get his diet of little neck
clams and cream of tomato soup.
And then the story of Mishawum Manor, where the emperors of the moving
picture world had been entertained by naked young ladies dancing the
highland fling! Who could have invented more delicious material for
the beguiling of bored jurymen? The Hearst newspaper put it on the
front page each day: the romantic life story of “Brownie” Kennedy, the
“madame” of this roadhouse; the number of husbands she had deserted,
the millionaires she had plundered and ruined; details about the
“champagne and chicken supper,” the hugging and the dancing, and how
the guests had disappeared to the rooms upstairs, so that at one time
there was nobody to eat the chicken or drink the champagne. Later they
were reassembled, much in déshabille, and the young ladies--names,
addresses and prices all given--were flinging their very highlandest,
when a flashlight went off and a photograph was taken of the scene.
Most of the guests were too drunk to know what this meant; when they
woke up next afternoon, they paid a thousand dollars for “entertainment
and breakage,” and thought that would be the end of it--just as if they
had been at home in Hollywood.
But no, this was a pious Puritan community; and presently the emperors
of moving pictures were receiving letters informing them that several
of the young ladies who had been hired for the party had husbands, and
these husbands were threatening suits for the desecration of their
wives; furthermore, some indignant moralist had carried the story
to the district attorney of Middlesex County, and that official was
greatly shocked. Middlesex is sacred territory, because it contains the
city of Cambridge, home of Harvard, the center of the center and hub of
the hub. It would take no less than half a million dollars to wipe out
the stain which these Hebrew and Babylonian emperors had put upon New
England culture.
After much dickering, and threats and counterthreats, the dispute was
settled by the payment of a hundred and five thousand dollars, which,
according to the newspapers, had been divided among the chiefs of
the political “ring,” including the Middlesex district attorney--no
Irish-Catholic “mick,” but a blue-blood of registered pedigree, a
gentleman with two hobbies, Red-baiting and college athletics. Only a
year ago he had led a spectacular raid against “Red headquarters” in
Cambridge, with a patrol wagon, cops, reporters and camera men, and
had confiscated a load of literature. He was engaged in umpiring the
Yale-Princeton football game, when the newspaper reporters came to
inform him that the Supreme Judicial Court had removed him from office.
Being a good sport, he went on with the game.
Middlesex County lies immediately to the north of Norfolk, and at its
nearest point is only four or five miles from Dedham; so it might
occur to some jurymen to wonder, could this corruption have crossed
the border, and affected those in charge of the present trial? The
authorities deemed it wise to provide automobiles, with bailiffs for
chauffeurs, to keep the jury entertained. On holidays the twelve good
men and true were escorted to the beach to picnic, and Sundays they
went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon they motored to
witness some of the patriotism rampant in the community.
On Sunday, twelve days after the trial started, the bodies of three
dead soldiers, dug out of the ground in France, were buried in the city
of Brockton, in Plymouth County, and the whole town turned out for
the ceremonies. On the same day at Whitman, in the same county, two
bodies were buried. On the following Sunday another one at Hingham, in
Norfolk County. The day before that was the anniversary of the Battle
of Belleau Wood, celebrated by veterans all over both counties; the
day before that was a great New England holiday, Bunker Hill Day,
celebrated in every town. On June 25th, just as the defense was getting
under way, the sacred Plymouth Rock was restored to place with a new
shrine over it, and there was a great celebration in Vanzetti’s old
home, reported in all newspapers and read about by all jurors. A week
later five thousand veterans of the “Yankee Division” assembled in
Plymouth, and held their exercises over the Fourth of July, the great
American patriotic holiday. On that day the town of Quincy, in Norfolk
County, witnessed the greatest parade of veterans in its history; the
whole countryside echoed with the sounds of firecrackers and bells and
military exhortations. “Never shall America forget the brave boys who
died for her!”--so said the orators.
II
And then the college commencements! There are a score of colleges
and universities in Massachusetts, to say nothing of two hundred and
forty-nine high schools; and all of them celebrated their exercises
while the Sacco-Vanzetti trial was in progress. All had eminent
persons to deliver orations, and few were the orators who did not
refer to the enemy within our midst, and the need for good citizens to
stand together. These exhortations would be quoted in the next day’s
newspapers, and read by the twelve good men and true in their legal
quarantine.
Cornelia took a day off and went up to the Harvard exercises.
Impossible to refuse, for it was the crisis of the effort to hold
Alice in line, and this was an occasion that would never come again,
the graduation of her only son; the public appearance of Alice with
Henry, and with all the family about her, would set forth their
solidarity to the world, and repudiate malicious gossip. Such was the
requirement of propriety. The three sisters might quarrel ever so
bitterly among themselves, but the world must see them side by side,
going through the formalities with dignity.
So now Clara spent the night in the Winters home in Boston, to keep
Alice from taking poison or running away. Deborah came early in the
morning, and the two of them worked with moral exhortations, and cups
of strong coffee, and an expert hairdresser, to get their distracted
sister into shape for exhibition. Clara rode in the car with Alice and
Henry, to relieve them of the necessity of talking--Clara could always
tell a thousand stories about the progress of her brood.
Deborah sent her car early in the morning to bring her mother; and
there they were, three middle-aged ladies and one old one, dressed with
the restrained and dignified but none the less expensive elegance of