Boston a novel
the Brahmins; Henry in tall silk hat and frock coat, braided trousers
and spats; Quincy Thornwell, gentleman of leisure, escorting Priscilla
Alvin Shaw, returned from her honeymoon in Florida. They took their
appointed places in Sander’s Theater, bowing right and left, greeting
their friends, exchanging compliments with the nearest. All the
conventions were satisfied.
The academic procession moved through the “Yard”; all the dignitaries
in their gorgeous-colored silk hoods and gowns, led by the university
marshal, and followed by thirteen hundred graduates-to-be, all in
caps and gowns. It was a special occasion, because Harvard was making
an innovation; for the first time in its two hundred and eighty-five
years, women were to be awarded regular Harvard degrees--not just
Radcliffe degrees signed by President Lowell. There were thirty-six
of these intruding females, but they were not permitted to leave the
sacred yard with the men, they had to join the procession near Lawrence
Hall.
In Sander’s Theater the sheriff of the county called the meeting
to order; the dean of the divinity school offered a prayer, three
graduates delivered orations, and the Governor of the Commonwealth made
a speech. A curious moment for Cornelia Thornwell, with ghosts walking
upon the platform, in costumes much out of style. How many years since
she had sat up there, and heard Josiah’s stern dry voice? The fashion
in speeches had not changed a particle; they still talked about the
responsibility of educated men for citizenship; they still rebuked
disturbers of the public thought. Said Governor Cox: “We ought to stop
complaining about the wrongs other men are doing until we are sure each
one of us is doing his part honorably and well.”
President Lowell arose to confer the degrees; an old gentleman with a
brown mustache and full red cheeks and proper coldness of manner. He
belonged to the inner circle of the sacred caste, enjoying an income
of not far from a million dollars a year from the family cotton mills
and real estate. He had been a lawyer on a small scale, when the great
financial interests of Boston had selected him to take charge of their
university. Under his direction there had been established a Graduate
School of Business Administration, to put a gloss of culture upon the
crudities of commercialism; the institution had grown with such speed
that it was turning matters about, and taking a lot of the gloss off
Harvard.
There was a slow procession of thirteen hundred young men in black
gowns and mortar-boards, walking across a stage, putting out a hand
and taking a roll of sheepskin; listening to a little speech, if it
happened to be a “cum laude,” with an extra sentence if it happened to
be a “magna cum laude,” and several sentences if it happened to be a
“summa cum laude.” It seemed symbolical of New England hypocrisy that
these were not real diplomas, but merely blanks; next day the graduates
had to go rooting in tubs, in the basement of the theater, to get their
own!
The only thrill in the ceremony is when one of the young men happens to
be known to you; then you make a decorous little noise with the palms
of your hands--the relic of enthusiasm among the blue-bloods. Cornelia
looked at the young faces, grave and pale, mostly, but still clean
and alive. She looked at the sheriffs and mayors and politicians and
lawyers and bankers--masks of cynicism, hardness and dullness. What
evil power presided over the lives of men, to work this transformation
from youth to age?
It came the turn of Josiah Thornwell Winters; and Cornelia hoped
that not many of these graduates were hiding a tragedy like his. She
had heard from Quincy Thornwell the end of the story: the woman from
“Larry Shay’s stable,” who had succeeded in making Young Josiah think
she was only nineteen, and innocent, was in reality twenty-five, a
victim of drugs, and also of a disease. This latter she had passed on
to her victim, so now he was paying several visits a week to leading
specialists, and his pale set face as he walked across the platform was
due to the fact that walking hurt him. But all over Sander’s Theater,
members of the audience nudged one another, whispering, “The grandson
of Governor Thornwell--the tall one.” They thought about his blue
blood, and mothers with marriageable daughters pondered ways to meet
him.
There was an elaborate banquet at the close of these ceremonies; and
also a series of class banquets, at which the “old boys” got together
and listened to patriotism and jokes. At one of these revelries the
orator was that courageous patriot, District Attorney Frederick G.
Katzmann, of Norfolk and Plymouth counties. The chairman introduced him
as one who had set out to rid Massachusetts of the Reds, and the orator
accepted the stern duty, and talked about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and
what he was going to do to those anarchists. Tumultuous applause from
the assembled banqueters, and toasts from their hip-pocket flasks, and
singing of “Fair Harvard” and “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow!”
III
Back to Dedham courthouse with its high white dome, with a ring of
port-holes like an ocean liner; the jury making its daily marches, and
the foreman saluting the flag; the manacled prisoners parading down the
middle of the street with their military escort; the guards keeping
watch, searching the spectators, even the handbags of the ladies; the
newspapers reporting sensations.
The defense was having its innings. Frank Burke, a man in his fifties,
formerly sealer of weights and measures for the city of Brockton, and
now giving demonstrations of glass-blowing, had been on the street in
South Braintree, where the bandit car crossed the railroad tracks. The
car had passed within ten feet of him, and the bandit in the right
front seat had leaned out and snapped a gun at him--it had failed to
explode. The man supposed to be Sacco had been in the right rear seat,
and Burke got a good look at him and described him, a flat, full face,
with broad heavy jowl--no resemblance to Sacco. There had been so much
patriotism in the trial that Burke thought a little would be welcome
from him, so he tried it, and there resulted a curious dialogue between
him and the district attorney:
“What was the color of the gun you saw?”
“Blue.”
“You have seen them, haven’t you?”
“Yes, my boy brought one home from the war.”
“Did you think I asked about your boy bringing one home?”
“No, but you were asking me about automatics, and I told you when I
seen one.”
“You thought you would tuck that in, did you?”
“I am not attempting to tuck anything in, Mr. Katzmann.”
“Did you do it inadvertently?”
“Yes, sir, I am trying--”
“And have all your answers made heretofore that have not been called
for been done inadvertently? I want you to tell the truth.”
Five laborers took the stand, men who had been digging an excavation,
and had witnessed the murder. These men all swore that neither Sacco
nor Vanzetti were in the bandit car; but they were Italians and
Spaniards, having to talk through interpreters, and it was easy for
Katzmann to discredit them. One laborer estimated that he was forty or
fifty feet from the shooting; Katzmann very cunningly got him to answer
a complicated question--that he was as sure of the distance as he was
that the bandits had not been Sacco and Vanzetti. Then he measured
the distance on the map, and said it was ninety-five feet; and that
finished Pedro Iscorla. In his closing speech Katzmann attacked all
these laborers as cowards, because they had stood by with picks and
shovels and failed to attack bandits who were shooting guns.
Two gun experts testified for the defense. Experts always balance
one another--if you have as much money as the other side. One was
a champion pistol shot and department head in a cartridge company;
the other was superintendent of the testing department of the Colt
Automatic Pistol Company, which had made Sacco’s gun, and he should
have known more about it than Captain Proctor, who had found himself
on the witness stand vainly trying to take the weapon apart. Both the
defense experts testified that the “mortal bullet” could not have come
from Sacco’s gun; nor did they, like Proctor, take back their testimony
later on.
Witnesses appeared to counter the testimony of the gateman Levangie,
and say how he had told them he did not see the bandits. The same for
Goodridge, the ex-convict; four men swore that he had made statements
contradicting his present testimony. Too bad these poolroom gentlemen
were not named Jones, Smith, Brown and Robinson, instead of Magazu,
Arrigoni, Manganio and D’Amato!
And then the witnesses to answer “Fainting Lola”: her friend, Mrs.
Campbell, a white-haired old woman who broke down and wept because she
did not like to call Lola such a liar; the policeman and the reporter
to whom Lola had admitted that she could not identify the bandits; and
then Kurlansky, the storekeeper, who got his rebuke from Judge Thayer
for having failed to tackle the police and prosecuting authorities of
Norfolk County, all by his valiant self!
And then poor Joseph Rosen, the Jewish peddler of cloth, who had sold
Vanzetti a piece of suiting at a great bargain because it had a hole
in it. He had gone with Vanzetti to show the goods to Mrs. Brini, and
they had had a long talk. Three weeks later he had read of Vanzetti’s
arrest for banditry, and had seen his picture and recognized him, and
realized that it was the day he had sold the cloth. He told his story
to the jury, and Katzmann provided a four-hour circus for bored jurymen
by kidding Rosen’s Yiddisher dialect, and asking where he had been on
a certain day a year ago, and where he had been three weeks ago. Poor
Rosen tried to protest that if he had a little time he could remember
some of that; which of course Katzmann and the jury took to mean that
he could have the lawyers’ help in remembering it.
As a matter of fact it would have been easy for the prosecution
to have verified Rosen’s story if it had cared to, for he said he
had sold cloth to many persons in Plymouth that day, including the
wife of the chief of police. But it was as Lee Swenson had told
Cornelia--hardly any use at all to put on foreign witnesses; the jury
took it for granted that their stories were “built,” and whether they
were all “built,” or only a few of them “built,” made no difference
in the result. Of course no jury would ever dream that the cultured
gentlemen who represented the Commonwealth would do such a thing as
tell a witness what to say! Never in a thousand years could they be
made to realize that of the five identification witnesses upon whom
the case against Sacco rested, one was a many times convicted crook,
one a hysterical prostitute, one a halfwit, one a disordered fantast,
and one a feeble victim of police pressure; all five of them persons
who had made statements identifying other men as the bandits, or else
saying that they could not identify any one. And all this known to the
prosecution, and some of it to the judge on the bench--so that the
procedure represented a conspiracy between the district attorney and
the judge, to deceive the jury, to hide the essential facts from them,
and persuade them that white was black.
IV
The great day of the trial: Bartolomeo Vanzetti taking the stand in his
own defense! He looked neat and proper in his new black suit, clean
white collar and little black silk tie. He had grown bald about the
temples during his long confinement, but he still had his heavy droopy
mustache; his earnest, deeply lined face was that of a student and
thinker.
They took him out of the “cage” to give his testimony, and stood him in
the prisoner’s dock, with a little low railing before him, where for