Boston a novel
“Since the trial before the jury of these cases, a new type of disease
would seem to have developed. It might be called ‘lego-psychic
neurosis’ or ‘hysteria’ which means: ‘a belief in the existence of
something which in fact and truth has no such existence.’ ... This
disease would seem to have reached a very dangerous condition, from
the argument of counsel, upon the present motion, when he charges Mr.
Sargent, Attorney-General of the United States and his subordinates,
and subordinates of Former-Attorney-General of the United States Mr.
Palmer and Mr. Katzmann and the District Attorney of Norfolk County,
with being in a conspiracy to send these two defendants to the electric
chair, not because they are murderers but because they are radicals....
This would seem to be a very low estimate of the District Attorney and
his assistants. The physician, ordinarily, in diagnosing a disease,
seeks to ascertain the length of time the symptoms have existed, with a
view of ascertaining how deep-seated the disease is and whether it is
curable or not. In these cases, from all the developed symptoms, the
Court is rather of the opinion that the disease is absolutely without
cure.”
But the most amazing thing in that amazing decision was what the
learned judge had to say about the issue of “radicalism,” and the
part it had played in the trial. Defending himself, with his back to
the wall, “Web” cited some dialogue which he said had passed between
Katzmann and Sacco. But you searched in the transcript of the testimony
for that passage, and couldn’t find it. You would go back and search
some more--you must have skipped a page, it must be there somewhere.
You would get others to search--until finally it had become certain
that “Web’s” citation was invented! So much progress “Judge Fury” had
made since the days of the Dedham trial, when his utmost daring had
been to present Frank Sibley with a page from the transcript with a
passage cut out. But now he concocted passages, and inserted them in
his decisions, in quotation marks, to be printed in the law-books, and
handed down to the scorn and fury of all future times! Said Mr. Justice
Thayer, in his rôle of fiction-writer:
“Mr. Sacco said that he feared punishment, that he was afraid of
deportation, that he did not want to go back to Italy, that he had
told all these falsehoods because of his fear. Mr. Katzmann, in his
cross-examination, brought out all these facts and then he asked this
question: ‘Mr. Sacco, you say you feared deportation and that is why
you told all these lies and why you did what you did?’ and Mr. Sacco
said ‘Yes.’ Then came the next question: ‘Mr. Sacco, at the very time
when you were telling these lies, you had already secured a passport
for Italy on which you, your wife, and two children were to sail two
days after the night of your arrest?’ and the answer was ‘Yes.’”--Not a
word of that in the record!
IX
Incidents such as this furnished propaganda for the radical and labor
press. No need of comment--they were their own comment. The story
spread, in wider and wider circles. Pierre Leon, in Paris, would
publish in his paper everything that was sent to him, and it would
be taken up by socialist and communist agencies, and translated into
a dozen languages, and made the subject of editorials and protest
meetings all over the world.
The little group in Boston, laboring in obscurity and despair, had
accomplished more than they knew. Their propaganda had influenced many
thousands whose names they would never know. In part it was the natural
drama of the case, the contrasts and thrills supplied by the Great
Novelist; in part it was the personality of Vanzetti. Joe Randall had
been right when he said, at that first meeting in Plymouth Jail: “The
police have given us a good martyr.” For five years Bart had been tried
in the fire, and he had stood the test; it would be hard to say how
any man could have stood it better. Outside, in times of excitement,
he had been fanatical and violent; but now those faults were remedied
by prison bars; now he was of necessity the student and thinker. He
met persons of the cultivated class, and learned that they, too,
were concerned about “joostice.” Without weakening in the cause of
his beloved proletariat, he came to understand that goodness is not a
matter of class, and that love can break down as many barriers as greed
can set up.
He was gentle, he was wise, and he was dignified. The humiliations of
prison life had failed to affect him; he had conquered his jailers. A
few days after his arrest, Mike Stewart, bluff and burly, had patted
him on the back and called him “Bertie”; but now the guards understood
that he was a superior man, and before his death the life of the
prison had come to revolve about him. He sat for many hours a day in
his cell, writing letters; and the least of these bore the stamp of
his personality. He had a style now--both in English and Italian. To a
friend he wrote:
“I have been told that the Italian is one of the most beautiful
of languages: to me it is: it is my mother’s language: it is the
angelic language to me. Yet all languages are beautiful when
they voice the beautiful, the good and the true. Your words are
harmonious and sweet to me as friendship’s voice is--they are
music, the vibration of life.”
Always thinking of others; with that natural courtesy which springs
from a kind heart. To a rancher’s wife on the Pacific coast he wrote:
“By the solidarity of the workers, friends, and comrades I always
have money to enable me to buy some food and fruits, cheese, etc.,
when the institution food does not agree with me. I am satisfied
with what I have. Very often I think while eating of some starved
human creatures and I feel a little ashamed though I have always
done my part to assure a piece of bread to each mouth. So please do
not be excessively troubled for me. Good sentiments and friendly
words are most necessary to me--and you are very most prodigal.”
So he said; but in truth he needed more than sentiments and words; he
needed the bosom of that Mother Nature whom he loved with a passion
both filial and romantic. When he heard that Cornelia was visiting
Plymouth, he wrote to her: “Oh! that sea, that sky, those freed and
full of life winds of Cape Cod! Maybe I will never see, never breathe,
never be at one with them again!” He poured out the anguish of his
effort to know and to achieve--in spite of terrifying handicaps:
“Exactly talking, I am not busy in writing but in trying to write.
For, the prison’s spell is telling its story also on me, and how so!
It seems to be increasing my understanding and diminishing my power
of expression. In fact ... it is ... an experience all right! but
an experience that undermines the life, straight to its sources and
centers so that as long as consciousness and memory are not yet weaken,
you can realized something ... but, as to express oneself at one’s best
one has to be at one’s best while after such experience one is not any
longer at his best! he can not any longer express himself at the best
of his power. These are the reasons why I am busy in trying to write
and writting very little at all. Oftentimes I manouvired hard to write
down what I wish; then, reaching it I perceive that it does not says
what I mean and I torn the writting in many little pieces.
“The crux of this inner drama is not only about expression ... it is
that I doubt my own thoughts, my opinions, my feeling, my sentiments,
believes and ideas. I am sure of nothing, I know nothing. When I think
of a thing and try to understand it, I see that in the time in the
space and in the matter that thing is, both before and after, related
to so many other things that I, following its relations, both backward
and forward, see it disappear in the ocean of the unknown and myself
lost in it. It is easy to create a universal sistem, to human minds;
that is why we are blessed by so many of universal sistems while no one
know what a bed-buck is.”
X
Cornelia would visit Charlestown and discuss these high metaphysical
problems with Bart, and then she would go to tea-parties and dinners in
the Back Bay, and tell her blue-blood friends about this philosophical
fish-peddler, and now and then persuade one to call upon him. So
gradually the class-lines were broken down in Boston, and strange
things happened--things which could not have been duplicated anywhere
else in the world. For example, the Madeiros reprieve, and the way it
was engineered!
The Madeiros motion for a new trial, turned down by Thayer, was in
process of appeal to the Supreme Court. But meantime, the mills of the
law were threatening to grind up the principal witness! Madeiros was
scheduled to be executed for the Wrentham bank murder, and if he were
to die, what would be left of the “Madeiros motion”? The Governor of
the Commonwealth was asked to postpone the execution, and he refused to
act. By what means could his hard heart be moved?
Cornelia went to call upon a certain venerable lady, one of the oldest
inhabitants of Beacon Hill, tremendously looked up to, even though
she took no part in politics or practical affairs. Hardly anything in
her home less than a hundred years old--except the occupant, who was
ninety-something, and regarded Cornelia Thornwell as one of the young
matrons. A shrine of respectability, with a little wizened female deity
in a faded black silk dress, to whom Cornelia told her troubles--the
losing struggle she was waging with politicians and bankers and
business men who thought they were protecting society and upholding
order when they took a chance on killing innocent men. See what was
happening to a fine, upright lawyer like William G. Thompson, who was
being abused up and down for daring to defend two anarchists!
The old, old lady listened, and then said, “My dear, the trouble is,
these persons don’t know Boston history. Tell them what John Adams and
the first Josiah Quincy did.”
“What is that?”
“You don’t know history either! When the British soldiers were indicted
for murder after the Boston massacre, John Adams and Josiah Quincy
defended them, to be sure they had a fair trial.”
“Did that really happen?” exclaimed Cornelia.
“Yes, indeed, my dear, you can look it up in the books. If you want to
make any headway in Boston, why don’t you really find out about us?”
It happened that at this time a New York newspaper had sent its labor
editor to study the Madeiros case. This man had come with the usual
prejudices, but convinced himself against his will that Sacco and
Vanzetti were innocent. He wanted to do something to help, and Cornelia
told him of this colonial precedent. Seeing the chance, he took it to
one of the most bitter reactionaries in Boston, a man whom Cornelia
herself would never have approached, for she knew that he had put up,
out of his private purse, more than half a million dollars for the war
upon the “Reds.”
This powerful person, who had been demanding a quick death for Sacco
and Vanzetti, was confronted with that sacred precedent, and felt
himself rebuked. Had John Adams and the first Josiah Quincy really
done such a thing? If it was true, he would do no less! He would write
or call upon the Governor, and ask for a reprieve of the Madeiros
sentence! He did so; and the result was, the reprieve was granted,
and Sacco and Vanzetti got another six months in which to make their
impression upon the world!
XI
Seven years had passed since the felt plants of Jerry Walker had been
taken from him by Henry Cabot Winters and Rupert Alvin and the rest of
the “Pilgrim National crowd.” Two years had passed since the jury had
brought in that tremendous verdict of ten and one-half million dollars