Boston a novel
fake bankruptcy proceedings against one enterprise; he had secretly
purchased some of Jerry’s notes, and caused other persons to start
lawsuits, to place attachments and obtain injunctions. And now here
he was on the witness-stand, squirming and wincing, obliged either to
admit that he had done these things, or else to be proved a perjurer.
On another day Cornelia heard the cross-examination of a great banker
from New York, president of one of the dozen institutions which control
the financial life of America. This gentleman had held several hundred
thousand dollars’ worth of Jerry’s notes, and had turned them over to
Rupert and Henry, to be used in clubbing Jerry to his knees. He had sat
down with the lawyers and learned an elaborate mass of perjury, and
felt very uncomfortable while telling it to Jerry’s lawyer, because
that lawyer happened to know him well. The lawyer asked a simple
question, about which he knew the banker was going to lie; and he fixed
his stern gaze upon his victim, a sort of hypnotic stare. Something
happened to the witness, he “lost his head,” as the saying is; all that
elaborate structure of falsehood which he had learned went suddenly out
of his mind, he couldn’t remember the beginning or the end of it.
A dead silence in the court-room, a long, long silence, apparently
endless. The witness sat with the lawyer staring into his eyes, like
a rabbit fascinated by a snake. At last the judge had to intervene:
“Are you conscious at all of any mental agitation just now, so that you
would like to leave the stand for a time and compose your mind? I think
we have been waiting nearly fifteen minutes for your answer to that
question. Are you sensible of a desire to leave the stand for a while?
If you are you may do so.”
But the great banker could not think what to say, even to that. The
Court had to repeat and urge. “You might answer that question. I
ask you if you desire to leave the stand for a time and collect your
thoughts on this subject?”
Finally the witness found his voice: “I would like to, to be perfectly
sure on this.”
Upon which the proceedings of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, now sitting within and for the County of Norfolk, came
to a halt. The great Wall Street banker left the chair, and sat apart
in the court-room, while everybody else, including the judge and the
jury, did nothing but wait. An amazing, an incredible scene. Whispers
of the spectators now and then, but mostly dead silence, so as not to
interrupt the mental labors of the man of millions, supposed to be
trying to recall whether he had had a certain conference with a certain
man on a certain day--but in reality trying to bring back to mind the
elaborate structure of falsehood which his lawyers had worked out for
him.
For almost an hour that extraordinary pause continued; and all the
while there were ghosts in the court-room, calling to Cornelia
Thornwell. The ghosts of Nicola Sacco, being harrowed by District
Attorney Katzmann! Nick being accused of the crime of having slandered
Harvard College! Cornelia imagined him asking for an hour’s time
to dig up from his subconscious mind the statistics, that Harvard
educated free something over one hundred students every year, while
the University of Wisconsin educated five thousand, eight hundred and
ninety-five! She imagined Nick asking for an hour’s time to recollect
whether he was “that man” who had dared to criticize America, after
running away to Mexico! She imagined him sitting for an hour trying to
recall what his lawyers had told him he had been doing on the night of
his arrest! Picturing such things, Cornelia had an impulse to laugh out
loud; which would have been a shocking breach of decorum--the Superior
Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, now sitting within and
for the County of Norfolk, would never have recovered from it. But
no, Cornelia had been for forty years the mistress of a blue-blood
household, and she sat, perfectly rigid, keeping her excitement inside.
X
Dark days for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, that year of 1924, with first
Nick in the insane asylum, and then Bart. Funds had run out entirely;
Fred Moore was a lawyer without an office; there was no committee, no
program, no action--nothing but two wops in torment, and a promise of
some legal decisions in an indefinite future. Judge Thayer was having
an attack of pneumonia, and then of appendicitis; but refusing to
die and let some other judge deal with the case. He would keep the
half-crazed victims in their cells, until he could have the glory and
the thrill of summoning them to court again, and with his cold metallic
voice like a thin strip of steel cutting into their souls.
Betty and Joe had finished their year in the paper-box factory in
a blaze of excitement. They had organized the workers, and been
discharged for their activities; whereupon the workers had declared
a strike, and stayed out nearly a month, and got soundly walloped by
police and bosses. Betty had had her turn on the picket-line, and
as a result had changed her philosophy; she was all for solidarity,
and opposed to every label--socialist, communist, anarchist, or what
not--which split the workers and wasted their energies. She would
go to Charlestown to visit Bart, and they would get into an excited
controversy, and Bart would write treatises to controvert her heresy.
He would forget his own deadly peril, in his anxiety to save Betty from
a false theory.
That was characteristic of all the Boston anarchists--they were strong
on theory, and weak on actuality. It was that which made the defense so
difficult; when a new move was to be made, they had to be persuaded,
and it was a job that took until the small hours of the morning, and
then had to be done all over again. No anarchist committee meeting ever
ended, because somebody had a right to say something more; no decision
could be taken, and if it was, it wasn’t binding. If you didn’t like
it, you said nothing, but went off and worked against it. If anybody
said that wasn’t fair, you shrugged your shoulders and said: “Shoo--er,
why not? Ain’t I got right for say what I please? No, I no got to say
it in committee, I say it when I want say it. If you not like it, you
got right say so--any time, any place.”
In other words a committee of anarchists was a contradiction in terms;
it was not a committee, but a number of impermeable and unassimilable
units, and anybody who ever did anything was sure to be regarded as a
dictator or meddler. Fred Moore was sleeping on a canvas cot in the
committee-headquarters, and living on pancakes, because he had turned
in his last salary-check to pay the printer; yet, if you brought up a
new plan to raise funds, you would be sure to hear that it was contrary
to “filosofia anarchica.” If, nevertheless, you insisted upon action,
you would be told, “All right, do it, if you want, you got right.” But
if you insisted that the sanction of the committee was necessary before
the action could be effective, you would hear, “No, we don’t give no
sanction, if you want do it, you do it for self.”
Even at times when money was on hand, it was almost impossible to get
them to pay it out. Money was contrary to “filosofia anarchica,” it was
an instrument and a symbol of graft. What did people need so much for?
What right did they have to it? In one desperate pinch, Cornelia sent
an organizer to New York, to address meetings and appeal to the radical
labor unions, especially the Jewish clothing-workers. This man sent
back a couple of thousand dollars; but he had to come back to Boston in
order to get his weekly pay-check to keep him going.
Fred Moore’s idea was to spend money to get more; it was the American
way. When he learned that there was a convict in Atlanta penitentiary
who might tell something about the real bandits, he wanted to get on
the train and rush down there; he did not want to spend a night arguing
with the committee, and miss his train as a result. When he wanted to
send a man to Italy to hunt for Coacci or Boda, or to trail a suspected
bandit to Texas or the Argentine, Moore would have to threaten to drop
the case; it would be the only way to get a check signed.
Such were the sufferings of lawyers in contact with anarchists: and
equally real and anguished were the sufferings of anarchists in
contact with lawyers! To rebels and “libertarians” the lawyer was the
incarnation of repression and enslavement; he was a spider who spun
webs of tradition about the limbs of humanity. Everything he did was
waste, his very language was an insult, and the expense he incurred
meant a bleeding to death of the radical movement. Let the martyrs die,
and spend the money upon “literature,” said the fanatics. But the
lawyer would point out that the money would not come for “literature,”
it came to keep the martyrs alive, and he was the sole possessor of the
secret lore whereby that might be accomplished.
As individuals, you would find many of these Italian anarchists
simple and lovable, sometimes charming; in their naïveté a relief
from New England stiffness and solemnity. You must be patient with
their fanaticism, realizing that it was the excess of a virtue;
they represented the principle of variation, without which human
life would be that of the ants and bees. When you found them most
exasperating--when you felt like taking the whole of “filosofia
anarchica” and dumping it into the Back Bay--then you must remind
yourself that great scientists had held and taught this creed,
Kropotkin and the Reclus brothers; great poets, such as Shelley and
Emerson; moral teachers, such as Tolstoi and Thoreau, George Fox and
William Penn, Jesus and Buddha. Not all these had called themselves by
the name anarchist, but all had stood for the principle, the supremacy
of the individual conscience over social compulsion. If the movement
produced more dangerous lunatics than it did prophets and saints, that
was the price which humanity had to pay in the search for higher types
of being.
XI
Dark days for idealists and dreamers of “joostice”! Fascist reaction
enthroned in Italy, and reaching out to control America; organizing the
Italians into murder-bands, to break up Socialist meetings in American
cities, and obtain the deportation of Italian radicals, to be shot at
home. In such activities they would have the coöperation of American
police, and of Federal secret service; Mussolini was the new hero of
our bankers and college-students, generally voted the greatest man in
the world.
It was a presidential election year, and Senator LaFollette, who had
exposed the oil-thieves, was a Bolshevik and betrayer of his country,
while “Cautious Cal” was the strong silent statesman, who had made more
speeches than any other man ever in the White House. In their frenzy
of reaction the big business men even set out to smash the proposed
constitutional amendment prohibiting child-labor, and keep several
millions of little ones in mills and mines, instead of going to school.
There was a ferocious campaign in Massachusetts, an explosion of all
the forces of bigotry and avarice. The little group of workers for
the Sacco-Vanzetti defense lived in the midst of that uproar, like
travelers in an African jungle who hear the beating of tom-toms and see
the glare of fires upon which human flesh is being roasted.
Cal Coolidge’s political and financial boss was a great lord of
cotton-mills in New England, soon to be made a United States senator.
He it was who led this campaign, and rallied the business men and
bankers, the newspaper editors and college professors, the bootleggers,
the criminals, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This latter
organization, kept generously by the business interests, had invested