Boston a novel
given to Mr. Kelley, the boss! All in vain the ten dollars a week
Rosina had put by, till they had fifteen hundred in the savings-bank,
with the record of deposits to show that it had been got by labor,
not by holdups! All in vain the hard toil which Bartolomeo Vanzetti
had performed for the owning class of New England, in stone-quarries
and brickyards, on railroads and reservoirs! In vain his years as
fish-peddler, the friendship of hundreds of Italian housewives, of
little Italian children, so that when they heard of his dreadful fate,
they wept and wrung their hands, and would never cease to talk about
him all the days of their lives! In vain his plea, “Save Nick, he got
the wife and kids!” Again the lawyers made their demands for separate
trials, but Judge Thayer stood firm to save the funds of Norfolk
County. Ten thousand dollars a week for seven weeks was all two wops
were worth!
XIV
A bell rang in the soul of Cornelia Thornwell: last call for witnesses!
She knew what was coming, and was not surprised when Lee Swenson asked
her to have lunch with him; nor when he got a table apart from others,
and looked about to make sure there was no listener. “Well, Nonna, what
do you think of our chances?”
“I don’t know what to think, Lee. I have no experience. You must tell
me.”
“Well, I think that speech of Sacco’s finished us.”
“Oh, Lee!” Something went weak inside Cornelia, and she lost interest
in lunch. She sat, staring before her, while the lawyer went on,
lowering his voice.
“One last chance, Nonna. Do you really want to save those boys? In two
hours I can fix you a story; you go on the stand and tell it, and it’ll
cinch the case. You can’t imagine how easy it will be--Katzmann won’t
dare be rough with you--if he did, I could rip him to pieces with this
jury. They’ll have no time to investigate; they can’t take more than
a day with their rebuttal witnesses, and that is the end--the case is
closed, and anything that comes out afterwards is a joke.”
“Lee--don’t ask me! Don’t ask me!” That was all she could say; he saw
the pain in her face, and dropped it. “All right, I won’t worry you.”
But she could not drop it; she had to argue with him about the case.
“Lee, how can they convict men on such evidence? I have kept a record:
thirty-one witnesses have said Vanzetti was not the man; twelve others,
put on by the prosecution, ought to have known him for the bandit if
he really was, and they didn’t.” She went on, clamoring her protest.
Not one of the witnesses who identified Bart or Nick had ever known
them before, or claimed to have seen them before; in every case it was
a question of remembering strangers; and to American eyes half the
Italians in the world looked like Sacco!
“Yes, Nonna,” said Lee, patiently.
“And the least time afterwards was three weeks--everybody had three
weeks to forget what the bandits looked like! Some, like Goodridge and
Pelzer, had nearly a year!”
“It’s the jury you have to convince, Nonna--not me!”
“But you must make that clear to them, Lee!”
“I’ll do so, never fear. But I can’t deny that they are anarchists; I
can’t deny that our principal witnesses are Italians. Those are the
fatal facts.”
They sat, with the food on their plates growing cold; something that
had happened to them many times. Life or death was in the balance.
Should Lee Swenson, in his speech to the jury, stress the lack of
evidence against Vanzetti? If he did so, he might get Vanzetti off. But
if Lee knew anything about this Yankee jury, they would “soak” Nick all
the harder; and Bart had positively forbidden it to be done. Once again
he commanded, “Save Nick, he got the wife and kids!”
They groped in the dark, and beat bare hands against stone walls; they
heard in imagination those warning voices which were to haunt the rest
of their lives. If only they had known this, if only they had done
that! They went back to the courtroom, and the case for the defense was
closed. And next day the prosecution put on its rebuttal witnesses--one
of them Henry Hellyer, the Pinkerton operative “H. H.”! He came
to discredit one of the defense witnesses, and the bland Katzmann
questioned him, serenely sure about those secrets, locked in his head,
which would have blown the case of the prosecution higher than a kite.
Actually, Hellyer had in his hand the reports he had turned in on his
investigations; when he was uncertain, he said, “I can find out”--and
he examined his notes, right there before everybody. And the defense
had no idea what was in the notes, no suspicion of the chance they were
losing! The bland Katzmann turned the witness over to Mr. McAnarney,
and that gentleman said, “No questions, if your honor please.” The
voices of all the future, shouting into the ears of the defense, were
heard by no one. Not a single “hunch,” not a dream, not a spirit-voice
or a telepathic message!
XV
Next morning Lee Swenson and Fred Moore pleaded the case of the
defense, and then the bland prosecutor rose to close the arguments.
He had four hours in which to apply those arts he had learned during
eleven years’ service to the Commonwealth; four hours in which the
minds of these twelve good Yankees and true belonged to him, to mold
and shape as he would.
For seven weeks they had listened to testimony, most of it dull and
soporific, obscurely related to the main issue. Lawyers had wrangled,
using long technical terms beyond the grasp of uneducated men. The
total amount of testimony was thirty-five hundred typewritten pages,
more than a million words. To study them, and analyze their meaning
and relationships, to digest them and evaluate them, would occupy a
brilliant legal mind several months; and here were two real estate men,
two machinists, a grocer, a mason, a stock-keeper, a clothing salesman,
a mill-operative, a shoemaker, a last-maker and a farmer. They could
not assimilate the evidence, and they would not have either time or
opportunity to try. They must make some sort of guess; and one who
understood their prejudices could determine what that guess would be.
The wops and most of their lawyers were “furriners”; but the genial and
friendly prosecutor was their county official, whom they had elected.
For purposes of this trial he called himself “the Commonwealth,” and in
that guise he could say pompous and magnificent things without sounding
foolish. He was honest, and he was conscientious--he told them so
himself, in grave and weighty words:
“Gentlemen, there is some responsibility upon the Commonwealth. There
is some responsibility upon a prosecutor who produces witnesses whose
evidence tends to prove murder. He may think well. He should think
long, and he should always have his intelligence and his conscience
with him before he puts the stamp of approval of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts upon him as a credible witness before he takes the stand
seeking to prove the guilt of men and if proven will result in their
death.”
From the point of view of prosody that statement could have been
improved: but the jurors knew what it meant. This was Fred Katzmann,
the prominent and successful, and he would tell them what to think.
For example, about Lola Andrews--a distracted, hysterical female, who
had stultified herself several times in Mr. Katzmann’s presence. Now
he told the jury what to think about her: “I have been in this office,
gentlemen, for now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too
long service for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye
or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews.” Concerning
Pelzer he told them that the witness had twice falsified, but was
“big and manly enough now to tell you of his prior falsehoods and his
reasons for them.” (The reasons were cowardice.) Concerning Levangie,
who had identified Vanzetti as driver of the bandit car, he asked the
jury to believe that Levangie had seen Vanzetti in the car, but thought
he had seen him driving when he wasn’t!
And then the amazing incident of the cap. There were two caps in
evidence--one which had been picked up at the scene of the crime, and
the other which had belonged to Sacco, and which the police had taken
from his home, after he had been arrested. This latter cap Nick had not
seen for fourteen months. While he was on the stand it was suddenly
held up, and he was asked if it was his.
Of course the poor fellow did not know what to think; the prosecutor
might be playing some trick upon him, getting him to recognize a cap
which was not his cap, and then accusing him of lying. All he could say
was, “It looks like my cap,” and again, “I think it is my cap, yes.”
Badgered about it, and told to put it on, he finally was brought to
say, “I don’t know. That cap looks too dirty to me.... It look like,
but it is probably dirt--probably dirty after”--meaning that it was
dirty after the police had kept it for a year and shown it about.
That was what Nick said; and now behold the outraged Mr. Katzmann,
storming before the jury: “But that is not all, gentlemen. He has
falsified to you before your very faces ... he would not admit,
gentlemen, that the cap was his!” Fred Moore interrupted, on behalf
of the defense, declaring that this was not a fair account of what
was in the record. But Judge Thayer failed to make the facts clear to
the jury, and Katzmann went right ahead: “Why, gentlemen, deny the
ownership of that cap?”
And then the Proctor incident; a long, detailed argument to the jury,
to the effect that two experts had testified that the “mortal bullet,”
taken from the body of Berardelli, had come from Sacco’s revolver.
Said Katzmann: “You might disregard all the identification testimony,
and base your verdict on the testimony of these experts.” And all
the time Katzmann knowing that he had framed a trick question, to
which Captain Proctor could answer yes, and fool the jury as to what
he really believed. Two years later, when Proctor made affidavit to
this trick, both Katzmann and his assistant, Williams, made answering
affidavits--and they were trick answers, seeming to deny Proctor’s
statements, but in reality not denying the essential one!
From half past two in the afternoon until seven in the evening a
court-room packed solid with human beings listened to the district
attorney deal with witness after witness in that spirit. The Supreme
Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has never
specifically declared that a prosecuting attorney must be fair; and
Katzmann’s successor, five years later, would be cynically flippant on
the subject. When it was pointed out how Katzmann had concealed the
witnesses Kelly and Kennedy from the defense, because they said that
Vanzetti was not in the bandit car, Katzmann’s successor would argue
before Judge Thayer, as one lawyer to another lawyer: “I wonder if Mr.
Thompson has not an exaggerated and too ethical notion of the functions
of a district attorney.”
But nothing like that now! To this jury Mr. Katzmann was the lover of
truth, the noble-minded, upright friend of justice. Also he was the
patriot; when he came to the end of a four-and-a-half-hour tirade,
exhausted, dripping with perspiration in the heat of a crowded
court-room, he remembered that the prisoners were wops, while the
jurymen were Yankees. His final words were a call to local solidarity:
“Gentlemen of the jury, do your duty. Do it like men. _Stand together,
you men of Norfolk!_”
XVI
Next day was Bastille Day in France, and a new Bastille was built in
America. “Web” Thayer mounted his throne and delivered his charge to
the jury. The throne was banked round with flowers, gifts from admirers
of law and order; and “Web’s” discourse began in a lofty and emotional
strain, as if affected by the intoxicating perfumes. “The Commonwealth