Boston a novel
and escort, tramp, tramp, tramp! Anarchists, who do not believe in
organization, learn a lesson from the grimly efficient Commonwealth!
CHAPTER XV
THE WHISPERING GALLERY
I
Sacco and Vanzetti were back in their cells: the former in jail
in Dedham while his appeals were heard, the latter in Charlestown
State Prison, working at his old sentence of fifteen years for the
Bridgewater crime. Nick, as usual, had nothing to do all day--a cruel
form of punishment; it required tact and sympathy on the part of
visitors to persuade him that it was worthwhile to stand on his head
and walk on his hands, as a means of not going mad. Bart was now making
license plates for automobiles: the one industry which the Commonwealth
had been able to save from the grasp of private capital, and which
therefore could be used to keep state convicts from wholesale madness.
It was not happy work, for it involved the touch and smell of acids,
which gradually undermined Vanzetti’s health, and made more difficulty
for those who lived with him in sympathy.
A black hour for the world, testing the souls of idealists. Famine in
Russia; the notorious inefficiency of communist bureaucracy had caused
the rains to stop falling--so it was reported by correspondents and
explained by editorial writers of capitalist newspapers. Throughout
Europe the White Terror enthroned; in Italy banded assassins in the
pay of banks and industrialists, murdering the leaders and rooting
out every trace of social protest, turning the country over to that
ultimate product of natural selection, the beast with the brains of
an engineer. Sacco and Vanzetti sat in their cells, and read of these
events, and stretched out their hands to the future, whose children
they were.
Each in his own way, they would learn to make their appeal to
that future. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, dish-washer, ditch-digger and
fish-peddler, would learn to write; he would labor all day at a
stubborn and hostile language, and conquer it, and shape it to his
ends. He, whose schooling had ceased at the age of thirteen, would
make himself a master of letters; he who had never seen the inside of
a college building, would write such prose as no living graduate of
Harvard had ever achieved; he who was to die as a common criminal,
would defend his faith in words of elemental eloquence, outranking
anything produced by an American since Lincoln’s second inaugural.
It would take long practice. Locked up alone in his cell, Bart would
write letters: letters to his lawyers, to members of the committee and
friends of the defense; letters to strangers who wrote to him, letters
to his anarchist comrades of Mexico, France, Russia. The rules of the
institution allowed only two letters a month, but they did not prevent
Bart’s handing a packet of manuscript to his lawyer.
At first his efforts would be crude; he would be looking up long
words in the dictionary, and stringing them together, a kind of Babu
English. He would use Italian words literally translated, producing
novel effects. He would concoct strange polysyllables, apparently of
his own imagining; you would start to smile, until it occurred to you
that it might be a new kind of poetry. To Cornelia he wrote: “Even
if we will be killed at once by the carnefice, or little by little
by the confinement, you remain to hold light the banner of the human
vindications, and to accomplished redemption.”
And again: “Do not desperate, comrade, of the cruelty of the human
events. Out of every little doctrine all too small and inadequate, out
of every party, petty and inefficient for the great problems of the
human justice and freedom--will ripen the historical nemesy and the
inevitable palingenesy.”
He began translating passages from Italian books into English, things
which interested him, and which he wanted Cornelia to understand;
he would take her criticisms and study them, and then try again--a
correspondence course in composition, having the added excitement of a
race with the executioner. He wrote:
“I was very beneficiated by your last visit and English-lesson. In
a letter received to-night, one Friend tells me that my English is
not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why
do not say horrible? Nevertheless, I can made a better translation
than the one in argument. I did it as I did for an experiment, to
prove if an almost letterally translation is intelligible. I show
it to some friends, asking them if they understand it. The answer
was ‘yes,’ while it should have been ‘no,’ that I might have remade
the work with much profit and better result.
“Of course, as the writing is beautiful in its original, and as
I labored very much at the dictionary, so I was thinking to have
accomplished something worth, and the disillution was, as almost
all disillatin, rather cruel. But when a poor one is surrounded
by many great difficulties, the small ones appear always a joke
to him, and after your visit I found myself in the best of the
mood--that is, I was decided to do in the future as much more good
than the much bad I did in the past. I analized attentively the
original--it is almost impossible intellectual pleasure--which for
hours has made me forget myself, the cell, and the other sorrowy
things.”
II
Cornelia’s contribution to the defense was to be a pamphlet telling the
story of the case, and summarizing the evidence of the two trials. The
procedures that she had watched with horror in Plymouth and Dedham she
would now set down in black and white, so that her friends could take
them home and study them. In the apartment on the north side of Beacon
Hill sat the little old lady all day, her shoulders stooped over a
volume of typewritten testimony, and sheafs of pencil-notes scattered
over the vacant places in the room.
Betty and Joe came to help, and they sorted and classified and
compared, and argued over this detail and that: identification
testimony relating to Sacco, relating to Vanzetti, relating to both and
to neither; alibi testimony, and refutation thereof; testimony relating
to Sacco’s cap and to Vanzetti’s pistol--where was it Bart had said he
had never fired the gun with which he had been arrested? Where was it
that Katzmann asked him his reason for concealing the price he had paid
for the gun? Betty would search, and Joe would search, and they filled
note-books with lists of cross-references. The half-dozen thick volumes
of typewritten testimony began to show signs of wear, and had to be
bound more tightly. Precious objects they were, having cost the defense
two or three thousand dollars of hard-begged money.
Cornelia was finding that as she grew older she wanted less and less
sleep. Life was becoming more precious as its supply ran out, and
nature was trying to save every moment. She would awaken at three or
four o’clock in the morning, and the details of the pamphlet would come
swarming into her mind, she would wonder about this point and that,
and presently decide she might as well get up and go to work. So Betty
would find her working by electric light, having failed to notice the
coming of day. Betty would scold, and try to put her to bed again.
Betty would threaten to get up early too, and Cornelia would have to
scold. The pamphlet grew to the size of a book, and would have become
an encyclopedia if they had let it. Then began the painful process of
cutting down and summarizing; and every time they left out a point, it
seemed that the life of Bart and Nick hung upon the decision.
Lee Swenson was retiring from the case: he had done his best, he said,
and failed, now let some one else have a try. There were tears in the
eyes of both when he said good-by to Cornelia. They promised they would
never forget each other--little danger of the promise being broken!
“Don’t worry about the past, Nonna,” said Lee; “you did your best.”
She didn’t know what to answer; she didn’t know what to think about
the questions that haunted her. What would have happened if she had
done what Lee wanted? Would she have done it, if she had foreseen the
present situation? And what was going to become of a country in which
the law was a cheat, and dreamers of justice its predestined victims?
Fred Moore was taking over the case; a lawyer less hated by the
authorities, it was hoped--though this proved a delusion. He was
younger than Swenson, an Irishman and a fighter, wrapped up in the
labor cause; a strange combination of emotional temperament and keen
analytical brain; a man who suffered deeply--as all men did who took up
the cause of the underdog in America. He, like Swenson, had witnessed
dreadful things, and told Cornelia stories of savagery and corruption
that made her shudder.
It was Moore’s task to prepare the appeal to the Supreme Judicial
Court from the various rulings of Judge Thayer at the Dedham trial.
To this end there must be drawn up what was known as a “bill of
exceptions” in the case: that is to say, a list of the objections
which the defense had made to the judge’s rulings, together with the
testimony concerned. It amounted to a summary of the case, giving the
essentials which the higher court would need; and it was necessary
that the defense, the prosecution and the judge should agree to every
word. The three parties had to sit day by day at a table, with a copy
of the testimony before them, marking the passages to be recopied,
and phrasing summaries of the rest. A long, slow job, for which Judge
Thayer had allowed from the middle of July to the first of November.
Thayer, Moore and an assistant district attorney did the work. Thayer
disliked Moore, but in the course of time he came to hate the assistant
district attorney, and to like Moore by comparison, so he chose Moore
to talk to about the case. A curious episode: one hot summer afternoon,
the assistant district attorney had left the room, and the old judge
looked up over the piles of papers and wiped the perspiration from his
forehead, and shook his head sorrowfully. “Moore, there are mountains
of perjury on both sides of this case!”
“Maybe so, Judge,” said the lawyer. “But your side has the most.”
The old man did not bother to resent this way of putting it. “I know,”
he said, “you think those fellows are innocent!”
“I do, Judge.”
“Well, I _know_ they are guilty.”
“How do you know it?”
“Never mind how--but I know.” It was the formula of ruling-class
Massachusetts, which for six years they would repeat; not in print,
not for the public, but in the smoking-rooms of the clubs, in homes or
offices, wherever one tried to pin them down and get the facts. “Never
mind how--but I know!”
III
It was going to cost eighteen thousand dollars to print the “bill of
exceptions”--two elaborate volumes; to say nothing of lawyers’ fees,
and office expenses, and the cost of raising the money. You got lists
of names--members of radical organizations, subscribers to liberal
papers, contributors to charity organizations, members of women’s
clubs--anybody who might have either a heart or a conscience; you got
typists and had envelopes addressed, and prepared a begging circular
and mailed it, and then with the money that came in you got more lists
and more typists and more circulars--it was the wheel of life.
But the returns did not come fast enough. The case was lagging,
threatening to die. The men were in jail, and they stayed there, and
the public wanted to go to sleep and forget them--the usual way.
Look at Mooney and Billings out in California, exclaimed the young
radicals--men whom everybody knew to be innocent, yet they stayed in
prison, forgotten--several years already, and it would be many, many
more. The friends of the defense were not content to have lawyers