Boston a novel
its funds in choice real estate, and become one of the wealthiest
corporations in the Commonwealth. Now was the time for it to pay its
debt, and suffer the little children to come unto the mill-masters.
The head of this religious machine was Cardinal O’Connell, jovially
referred to by the newspaper men as “Big Bill,” and by his enemies
as “the papal bull”; a huge hippopotamus of a man, weighing over
three hundred pounds, and like Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge and the
chief officer of Dedham Jail, devoting his attention to the problem
of “reducing.” It happened that Cornelia had spent her summers near
the prelate’s summer residence, and seen him daily, taking his
constitutional, a picturesque figure in a scarlet cloak, against
a background of azure river. To his intimates he was a genial and
convivial soul--not troubled by the eighteenth amendment, but having
access to the best stores of conviviality. He was an organist and a
judge of pictures, a generous buyer of old masters and rare books; a
Renaissance prince of the church, building a white stone palace out
on Commonwealth Avenue. The Jews had built themselves a Temple Israel
nearby, a plain concrete structure, and the Irish-Catholic conductors
of street-cars, answering the questions of tourists, would point their
thumb contemptuously and say, “That? Sure, that’s Cardinal O’Connell’s
garage.”
Cornelia went to see him, a little later on, escorted by her nephew
Quincy. She pleaded with the great man to say a word for mercy to
Sacco and Vanzetti; but he was cautious and preferred to talk about
Japanese art and Buddhist philosophy. Quincy sat, a much-amused
spectator; being a wit and diner-out, he knew the great man, and had
brought his Bolshevik aunt to tea by way of a prank. Going and coming,
Quincy told stories about the Cardinal, who had begun life as an Irish
“mick” in “the Patch,” as the slums of Lowell were known. He was much
too intelligent a man to believe the mythology he taught; but he held
that it was what the masses needed to keep them obedient. He owned many
blocks of stock in cotton-mills, and was a reactionist now, but in his
young days had been a modernist, and highly indignant because some of
his writings had been put on the Index.
There were many Catholics among the millionaire industrialists and
bankers of Massachusetts, and the Cardinal would invite them to dinner;
they would come with stars on their bosoms and garters on their
legs, and would be in heaven. The great prelate could ask them for a
million or two any day, and buy the best sites for orphan asylums and
seminaries and church colleges and what not. In this way he had spent
fifty million dollars in ten years. So now when these mill-owners and
bankers wanted the people of Massachusetts to vote their children into
wage-slavery, “Big Bill” was the boy to do their job.
Four Sundays during the month of October, 1924, he made every priest in
the diocese stand before the high altar at high mass, and read aloud a
diatribe, based upon the lies circulated by the manufacturers’ agents,
representing the Children’s Bureau at Washington as a device of Moscow
for the undermining of the American home. Mrs. Florence Kelley, leading
social worker, and champion of the child-labor amendment, had once been
the wife of a Russian. Thirty-two years previously, she had divorced
this man, and had received from the courts the right to resume her
father’s name of Kelley; she had been a “Kelley” for sixty out of her
sixty-eight years of life. But now the opponents of the child-labor
amendment placarded her from Maine to California as Mrs. Wischnewetzky,
Bolshevik agent! By methods such as this, they induced the people of
Massachusetts to vote down the amendment by two to one, and the little
children of the Commonwealth were saved for God and Senator Butler.
XII
In November, 1924, after a year, Judge Thayer handed down his
decision on the Proctor motion for a new trial. This motion was the
main reliance of the defense lawyers; they could not imagine how the
confession of one of the state’s leading witnesses that he had “framed”
his evidence in collusion with the prosecutors, could fail to be
ground for a new trial. But “Web” would show them! He would crowd all
his arts into one document--twisting and wriggling, evading issues;
misrepresenting everything the defense lawyers had claimed about the
Proctor confession.
The issue was very simple, but “Web” wound it up in thousands of words,
and to make plain all his tricks would require thousands more. He said
that the questions asked of Captain Proctor were clear, and must have
been perfectly understood by him; which would have been a good joke, if
it had been meant as such. Of course they were understood by Proctor,
and no one had ever suggested that they were not. What Proctor had
confessed was that the questions had been contrived for the purpose of
being obscure to the jury: which was certainly an entirely different
matter.
Next “Web” asked whether the questions were “unfair or improper.” Of
course they were not. What had been “unfair and improper” was that the
witness and the district attorney had framed the questions in such a
way that the jury would think they meant what they didn’t mean; also
that the judge had represented to the jury that they meant what they
didn’t mean.
The question which had been “framed” had to do with whether Proctor,
as an expert on fire-arms, believed that the “mortal bullet” had come
through Sacco’s pistol and none other. And it really made you wonder
if you were dealing with an insane man when the judge went on from
point to point, asking over and over again why Proctor hadn’t said
plainly what he meant; as if Proctor had tried to make matters plain,
and failed--when the whole point of the confession was that he had
deliberately made matters obscure!
But “cunning old Fury” was not insane; he knew what he was doing, and
went ahead, twisting every contention out of shape, misrepresenting
the plain meaning of the plainest English words. He charged the defense
lawyers with having claimed that Proctor “honestly believed that the
mortal bullet was not fired through the Sacco pistol.” But Proctor had
not said that, and the defense had not said that he had said it.
Funniest joke of all--“Web” said that the answers of the district
attorney and his assistant to the Proctor confession were “clear and
convincing.” To employ the slang of Pierre Leon, you could “bet your
shoes” they were! They were clear and convincing of the fact that
Katzmann and Williams knew that Proctor’s confession was true, and had
not dared to deny it while Proctor was alive. They had carefully evaded
the main point; and the judge now carefully followed suit; relying, of
course, upon the fact that nobody would have the text of the answers,
nor the patience to disentangle the sophistry in them.
Having performed this intellectual feat, “Web” was proud of it, and
went out, as usual, to boast. He thought he had earned a holiday,
so he went to Dartmouth, his college, to attend one of the football
games. On the field he saw Professor James P. Richardson, and came up
to him, demanding in a loud voice: “Did you see what I did to those
anarchistic bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for a
while. Let them go to the supreme court now and see what they can get
out of them!” There was more to the discourse, and the professor stood,
upon pins and needles, as the saying is, because it seemed to him an
unimaginable impropriety, and he knew that others were listening. He
got away as quickly as he could.
It was “Web’s” way. He was engaged upon a crusade, to destroy the Reds
in Massachusetts; and he did not understand how others could fail to be
interested in his exploits. He would punish his friends, his club-mates
and associates with long tirades, until they would be bored and ask
him to quit. A group of lawyers who lunched in the club at Worcester,
would turn their shoulders to him and talk about other matters. The old
man would sit mumbling to himself: “They don’t understand! They don’t
realize! The Vandals are at our gates, and are going to destroy us!”
XIII
This failure of the “Proctor motion” was the finishing blow for
Vanzetti. Impossible to hope after that! Impossible to go on enduring
the indignities of prison. Bart decided that his friends and the whole
movement were being betrayed. Also he took up the notion that his
ill health was due to slow poisons given to him in his food. He too
declared a “hungry-strike,” and about Christmas-time of the year 1924
was certified to the Bridgewater asylum. The Sunday after he was taken
away, the prison chaplain preached a sermon to his flock, pointing out
the danger of departing from the holy faith. Look at poor Vanzetti, who
had lost his mind, a hopeless wreck! It was the same Father Murphy who
had said, “Tell me, Vanzetti, who drove the car at South Braintree?”
To the psychiatrists at Bridgewater this prisoner represented a
well-known type; a victim of what they called “delusions of grandeur,”
or the “messianic complex.” He had the notion that the future would
be interested in him and his sayings and doings; that books would be
written about his case, and translated into many languages, and read
by millions of people. He lived his life and endured his sufferings in
the presence of future generations, who would reverse Judge Thayer’s
verdict upon him, as they had reversed other verdicts upon agitators
and rebels--John Brown and Giordano Bruno and John Huss, Galileo and
Socrates and Jesus. Furthermore, he had the fixed idea that he could
learn to write English, and accumulated quantities of manuscript, which
he thought would convert others to his cause.
In order to pacify him, it was necessary to pretend to agree with
him, and then one could have quite interesting talks. He was a man of
surprising culture, considering that he had been a laborer all his
life; he was reflective, shrewd, even humorous at times. He did not
make friends easily, preferring to sit aloof; but when a physician said
that he believed in “joostice,” the prisoner would be eager to explain
his brand of it, and would sit for hours, telling Dr. Stearns with the
utmost seriousness how a society might be run without government or
forcible repression.
These specialists in human mentality were not asked their opinion as
to the probable guilt of this convicted bandit, but they could not
help having ideas on the subject. They reported Vanzetti as of the
intellectual, not the motor type; awkward, not active. They said that
if he committed an assault, it would be, not with intent to kill, but
to show feeling. They pictured a man with his excess of emotion and
imagination, attempting to commit a hold-up; it was their judgment that
his heart would beat violently, his knees would shake, he would hear
a noise behind him, and whirl about and shoot blindly, or throw away
the gun in a panic--a “brainstorm,” as it was known to the writers and
readers of crime-news. The psychiatrists furthermore reported that
the professional bandits and hold-up men in the prisons jeered at the
idea that Sacco and Vanzetti could have done that South Braintree job;
they were offended in their dignity by the suggestion that a couple of
bunglers and novices could have got away with anything so competent and
swift.
XIV
The jury brought in its verdict in the Jerry Walker case; a terrible
blow to the Thornwell men--saying, in effect, that they had perjured
themselves upon the witness-stand. The jury found that Jerry Walker was
entitled to damages equal to the market value of his properties at the
time they were taken from him, plus the interest; a trifle over ten and
one-half millions of dollars. It was the biggest verdict ever brought