CHAPTER IX
THE WEB OF FATE
I
Plymouth Court-house stands at the head of the square, a large and stately building of red brick, with ivy climbing the walls, and white colonial entrances, and a niche containing a figure of justice, open-eyed. The court-room is bare and white, with a throne of polished wood, and over it a great seal of the “Plymouth Society,” with the flags of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts draped on top. It is all extremely solemn and formal; the bailiff wears a uniform, and carries a “wand,” or long stick with which he holds the spectators in awe.
On the morning of the trial of Bartolomeo Vanzetti the room was filled with spectators from Bridgewater, curious to behold the wicked bandit; also a few working-people of foreign birth, Italians and Portuguese of North Plymouth who remembered what Vanzetti had done for them in the strike. The men had put on celluloid collars with gilt studs and no ties, the women wore shawls and aprons; they sat, morning and afternoon, following with strained attention a mysterious procedure in a strange tongue. There were spectators from Boston, but no reporters from there; the case excited only local interest, and was left to local correspondents.
The prisoner was brought in, shackled to a deputy by each wrist; also a steel cage was brought in, and he was locked inside. This in itself was almost equivalent to a conviction--it made him look so alarming to a jury, so much like a wild beast. The district attorney entered--a stocky man of German parentage, florid, blond, good-looking, smartly dressed. Fred Katzmann was his name, a Mason and a “joiner,” prominent in the political ring which governed the county. Most political rings in America are financed by the local corporations, and exist to carry out their will; the efficiency of a public official usually consists in the fact that he knows their needs and wishes so thoroughly that he does what they want without having to be told.
In this case Fred Katzmann’s course was very easy--to consult his prejudices. He knew that the Reds were pledged to destroy American institutions, and therefore it was a patriotic service to destroy the Reds. Later on he went before the alumni of his college, assembled for banqueting, and the chairman introduced him as a hero who was going to save the Commonwealth from its secret foes; the banqueters cheered him tumultuously, and he made a speech accepting the stern duty. All the district attorneys of the neighboring counties were making such speeches at this time--it was an easy way to be popular, and to conceal orgies of grafting and blackmailing--what was soon afterwards to be described, in the charges against one of the most oratorical, as “malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance in office.”
Fred Katzmann was personally an easy-going man, and cultivated a manner of geniality which made a hit with juries. When the lawyers for the defense came in, carrying briefcases and looking important, he greeted them cordially; they were his friends, and during the procedures he would refer to them as “my brothers.” He would carry on a merry battle of wits with them, and the moment court was adjourned, he would walk out side by side with them, and they would sit at lunch and “josh” each other about the points they had lost or won. It was exactly like a tennis tournament--except that in tennis they used a ball, while in this legal game it was a wop.
II
A door in the front of the court-room opened, and there entered a thin, shrunken old gentleman with a white mustache and a face like parchment. He wore a black silk robe, and the moment he appeared the bailiff pounded on the floor with his wand and shouted, “Court!” and all the lawyers stood up, and the spectators stood up, and remained standing. The bailiff drew a breath and shouted, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons having anything to do before the Honorable, the Justices of the Superior Court, now sitting within and for the County of Plymouth, draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard! God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” Whereupon the wrinkled old gentleman sat down, and everybody else did the same.
Webster Thayer, judge of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was what the pathologists call a “ticquer”; that is, he blinked with a nervous affliction as he gazed about his domain. His sharp, withered face was a symbol of the old Puritan spirit; his voice, like a steel saw cutting through wood, was an ancestral inheritance, produced by three hundred years of cold and foggy winds. He aspired to exhibit repose, but his fear of so many foreigners in his court-room showed itself by incessant nervous glances. He was obsessed with a phobia on the subject of Reds, and talked about it incessantly, with so much repetition that many persons avoided him, or ruthlessly shut him up.
Cornelia had never heard of “Web” Thayer before, but he was to be the subject of her study for seven years, and before long she knew him completely. During this Plymouth trial he did not know who she was; but during the second trial, that of Sacco and Vanzetti a year later, he had heard about her, and he summoned her three times to his chambers to impress his personality upon her and to justify his ways. So she learned that the basis of his being was an inferiority complex, a sense of the gulf which yawned between him and the great ones of his community, and which he would never cross, even though he won his way to the Supreme Judicial bench. He was a Thayer, but not of the “right” ones; and in Massachusetts it is a special offense to bear an honored name unless you are one of the “right” ones. There are the “right” Cabots--and assuredly they are not those who used to be called Caboto and Kabotinsky, and got permission from a too complaisant court to Americanize themselves. There are “right” Coolidges, and Calvin is not among them, and would not be, though he were president of the United States for half a dozen terms.
“Web” lived in Worcester, which is a city in the wilds of the far west--that is to say, forty miles removed from the cultural influences of the Back Bay. It is a hardware center, the home of hardware men, who hustle and “boost” and make “selling talks.” “Web” had gone to Dartmouth, a small college in the hills of New Hampshire, whose graduates are looked down upon by the haughty scions of the Harvard “Gold Coast.” “Web” asserted his uneasy personality, and drew attention to himself, something the “blue-bloods” never do, because they do not have to. In this Sacco-Vanzetti affair “Web” would do what the Commonwealth wanted him to do, but he would do it in such a way that the Back Bay would blush for him, and comfort itself by calling it one more sign of the degradation of politics, a consequence of turning over public affairs to the “mob.”
He was a man of intense vanity, and played the judicial game as a drama in which he was hero and king. But he could never be sure whether he was successful in the rôle, and the actor would stop in the middle of the play to ask the audience. To the lawyers, or any one else who came to his chambers after the sessions, he would say, “Am I handling this all right?” To the newspaper reporters he would say, “Now, boys, give me a good deal on this.” If the reporter happened to be a young and pretty woman, as it did in at least one case, he would employ the arts of gallantry, which are somehow less welcome from an old man with a skin like a mummy’s. He would take a seat beside her on the train going to the trial, and smile and ogle, and present a flower to her, and discuss the case. His voice had a penetrating quality, and when the train stopped, every one in the car would hear what he was saying. He must have known the mental discomfort he was causing to his auditor, yet something drove him to go on.
There is an ancient tradition among those who deal with the law that a judge must not discuss a case in public, at least not while it is actually before him. But in handling Sacco and Vanzetti, “Web” Thayer could not keep within these traditional limits. He would talk about the case in a club dining-room, until all the men would leave the table; he would approach a Dartmouth professor on the football field, asking in a loud voice, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards the other day?” The horror of these words became such in Massachusetts that the Commonwealth had to send its policemen with hickory clubs to crack the skulls of demonstrants who carried the words on a banner. Because there was no way to keep them from being spoken aloud, Boston Common had to be closed to public speakers for the first time in its three hundred years of history.
III
One by one the talesmen took the stand, and were questioned; under the Massachusetts practice, all this questioning was done by the judge, and the defendants’ lawyers could only exercise the right of challenge. One by one the jurors were selected: Arthur W. Burgess, shoemaker of the town of Hanson, Henry S. Burgess, caretaker of the town of Wareham, Joseph Frawley, shoe-finisher of the town of Brockton, Charles A. Gale, clerk, of the town of Norwell--so it went, all Anglo-Saxon names. Put none but Americans on guard! Edwin P. Litchfield, shoe-worker of Pembroke, Oliver B. Poole, clerk of Brockton, Alfred M. Shaw, Jr., laborer of Carver, Charles C. Wilbur, tackmaker of Kingston: such little people of the old stock, having failed for one reason or another to become rich, looked with bitter contempt upon the immigrants who came pouring into the country, to beat down wages and make life harder for the “white men” of New England. Far from having any sense of class solidarity, they clung to the American idea that their children would rise and join the leisure class; their attitude to the Italian was that of the poor whites of the south to the Negroes. “All these wops stand together,” said one juryman to another, discussing the case at lunch in a restaurant. The remark was overheard, but nothing came of it.
Another juror, Arthur S. Nickerson, a foreman in the Plymouth Cordage Company! Another foreman of that same company had thrown Vanzetti, the agitator, out of their plant, and kept him out four years and more; others had refused him employment, and some one had caused him to be shadowed by detectives for eighteen months after the strike. Now Nickerson was to help decide whether or not Vanzetti should be set at liberty to lead another strike, and deprive the cordage company of another two hundred thousand dollars a year in extra wages! Vanzetti’s friends saw with dismay his lawyers permit such a juror to be accepted. They asked themselves, could it be because one of the lawyers was a stockholder in the company, and looking to the company for legal business as well as for dividends? It was permissible to ask.
The assistant district attorney rose, and addressed the jury, telling them what he was going to prove. He told them all that elaborate “theory” about the Coacci house and the bandit-car, which had been stolen a month before the Bridgewater crime, and found in Manley woods abandoned after the South Braintree crime. He brought this car, a Buick, in front of the court-house, and he told them about Boda, and how he was going to prove that Boda had been driving a Buick car a short while before the crime. He told them about Orciani--despite the fact that they had had to drop Orciani on account of an American alibi. He told them about Sacco, despite the fact that they had had to drop Sacco from this case on account of another American alibi. He built up in the jury’s mind an elaborate picture of bandit-gangs, bandit-houses and bandit-cars--and then in the course of the trial he failed to produce a particle of evidence to connect either Sacco, Coacci, Orciani or Boda with any crime, or to connect Coacci’s house with any crime, or to connect any one of the five men with the so-called bandit-car. One scrap of testimony--a milkman had seen Boda driving a Buick car a month or two before the crime; or at least he thought it was Boda and he thought it was a Buick. Yet they brought in all this complicated and alarming mass of “theory,” not merely at this Plymouth trial, but at the later trial of Sacco and Vanzetti for the South Braintree crime; they showed the bandit-car in both cases, and the bullet-hole in it, and planted the mass of suspicion in the minds of both juries.
IV
Benjamin F. Bowles to the stand: a special officer employed by the shoe-company, and at the same time a member of Mike Stewart’s police force in Bridgewater. He had been riding in the seat alongside the driver of the truck, when two bandits, one with a shotgun, the other with a revolver, had rushed out and opened fire. The chauffeur of the paytruck had fainted from fright, and Bowles had seized the steering-wheel and guided the truck with his left hand, while with his right he fired a revolver at the shotgun bandit, until the bandit turned and ran. Later in the trial Bowles took the stand again and changed his testimony, so as to make it fit with the story he had told at the preliminary hearing: he now swore that he had fired, not at the shotgun-bandit, but at the other one, the revolver-bandit. So here was the picture this super-policeman presented to the jury: he had steered a fast-moving truck with his left hand, fired a revolver at a bandit with his right hand, and at the same time used his eyes to study the appearance of a second bandit, so effectively that he could give a detailed description fitting the features, hair, eyes and clothing of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, now sitting in the prisoner’s dock before him! At the preliminary hearing Bowles had been “pretty positive” that the shotgun bandit had had a “short and croppy” mustache; but now at the trial he was “positive” that this bandit had had a “bushy” mustache.
Next came a shoe-inspector, Frank Harding, known as “Skip,” who had witnessed the crime. He had talked to a reporter of the Boston _Globe_, an hour or two afterwards, and described the bandit as “smooth-shaven.” At the preliminary hearing he had described him as having “an overgrown Charlie Chaplin mustache.” Now at the trial he identified him as Vanzetti. He had positively identified Orciani as the other bandit; but that fact was not evidence at the trial. Neither was the _Globe_ reporter’s testimony, for that was not discovered until years later--when it might as well not have been discovered at all. To the Pinkerton detectives “Skip” had described the bandit-car as a Hudson; and he had been an automobile mechanic and knew cars. But now he swore it was a Buick--which happened to be what the “theory” required.
Then came the paymaster, Cox, who had described the shotgun bandit at the preliminary hearing as “short and of slight build.” Now he made it agree with Bowles--“five feet eight.” But no effort of the district attorney could get him to say that he was sure Vanzetti was the man.
Then came the elderly Georgina Brooks, and with her the age of miracles came back. Mrs. Brooks testified that she had looked out of the window of the Bridgewater railroad depot--she specified which window--and had seen “fire and smoke from a gun.” It so happened that between that window and the spot where the firing had occurred, there intervened the full bulk of two two-story houses. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense employed a surveyor to make a map of the scene--but like everything else, it was too late.
Also Mrs. Brooks testified that on her way to the depot, and before the crime, she had inspected the bandit-car and the bandits. She identified Vanzetti as a man she had looked at twice, and who had looked at her “severely.” Why she should have turned to look at the car a second time, and been so particular about examining the features of a man sitting casually in an automobile was something Mrs. Brooks could not explain. But she admitted that with one eye she could barely make out the silhouette of objects, and that she had been undergoing treatment for the other eye.
Then young Shaw, a schoolboy who had heard the firing and dodged behind a tree. He had seen the shotgun-bandit run away, at a distance of a hundred and forty-five feet, and said that he could tell the man was a foreigner by the way he ran. “What sort of a foreigner?” and the boy replied, “Either Italian or Russian.”
“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a Norwegian?”
“Yes.”
“What is the difference?”
“Unsteady.”
Then came Mike Stewart, large, powerful, heavy-lidded. He brought with him his theory--but you may be sure he never mentioned the “detective machine,” from which the theory had been born! Neither did he mention the Pinkerton reports, and how they confuted the testimony of “Skip” Harding. “Skip” had taken down the number of the bandit-car, and given a memorandum to Mike, who had unfortunately lost it. Also, unfortunately, there was no number-plate on the car which the police had found in the Manley woods.
They introduced Vanzetti’s cap, and a man swore it resembled the cap worn by the shotgun-bandit--although Cox and Mrs. Brooks had sworn to a shotgun-bandit in a soft hat. And that was practically all they had to offer, except for an empty twelve-gauge shotgun shell which they claimed to have picked up at the scene of the shooting. When Vanzetti had been arrested, he had had four shotgun shells in his pocket, and these were put into evidence, but the jury never heard Vanzetti’s story of how he came to have them. He had spent the day of his arrest at Sacco’s, while the family was packing up for Italy, and these shells, left over from hunting, were picked up on a shelf; Vanzetti had put them into his pocket, saying that he would turn them over to some comrade and get fifty cents for the cause. But that story must not be told to the jury, because Vanzetti would be asked what he mean by the “cause,” and he would have to answer that it was the evil cause of anarchism. Nor would it do to put Sacco on the stand, or his wife, because that would bring in the other crime, and the lawyers were maintaining their legal fiction that the jury knew nothing about it--although, of course, every one of them had read about it on the front page of all the papers, and the assistant district attorney had brought Sacco in as a part of the “theory”!
V
Such was the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against Bartolomeo Vanzetti. And now it was the defendant’s turn to produce his alibi, and persuade a Yankee jury to believe it. Cornelia and Betty and Joe, watching these proceedings day by day with strained and fearful attention, realized too late how difficult it was going to be. There sat those native sons of New England, lean-faced and stern--elderly men, most of them, because the younger and more active found means to avoid jury duty. Men with such names as Burgess and Gale and Litchfield and Nickerson and Shaw were invited to believe the testimony of Vittorio Papa and Carlo Balboni and Vincenzo Brini and Enrico Bastoni and Teresa Malaguti and Adalaida Bongiovanni and Marguaritta Fiocchi: men with black hair and eyebrows, broad faces and high cheek-bones, uncouth and sinister, clad in ill-fitting cheap store-clothes; women short and stout, with broad mouths and low foreheads, with no collars to their shirt-waists, wearing aprons in front of them and dingy shawls about their shoulders, speaking a foreign jabber which was turned into English by an interpreter who looked as much like a bandit as the others. These were the “Dagoes” who were taking bread out of the mouths of the old stock, swarming into the factory towns, carrying fire-arms, living like pigs, and raising litters of as many little pigs as any farmer ever saw. “These wops all stand together,” said one juryman; and all native New England agreed.
Mrs. Mary Fortini, Bart’s landlady, told how she had waked him up at six o’clock that morning before Christmas, and how he had gulped down his bread and coffee, and hurried to get out his cart and his eels. Carlo Balboni told how he had come home from his night work, and caused Mrs. Fortini to wake Bart, so that he, Balboni, might be the first customer. John Di Carlo, who kept a shoe-store, testified how Bart had brought him eels while he was cleaning out the store, a little after seven. Each of these witnesses was harrowed by the prosecution, who sought by every legal trick to trip them up in their testimony.
The issue of “radicalism” was not supposed to be brought into the trial; the jury was not supposed to know about it, and in the years that were to follow you would hear judges and editors and governors and college presidents and other eminent persons stoutly maintaining that this issue had not entered the case until the defense had brought it in at the second trial. But behold, here was the suave district attorney, questioning the shoe-store proprietor: “Have you ever discussed government theories over there between you? Have you discussed the question of the poor man and the rich man between you?” And later comes Michael Sassi, a gardener, to the stand, and the prosecutor asks, “Have you heard anything of his political beliefs? Have you heard him make any speeches to your friends in the cordage company?” This questioning led by accident to some character testimony--in spite of the effort to bar such testimony. Said the district attorney, “You have dined many times with Vanzetti, haven’t you?”
“With Brini, as his guest, I dined many times: Vanzetti boarded with him and sometimes he was present.”
“You used to play cards with the defendant?”
“Vanzetti does not play.”
“To smoke, didn’t you?”
“I do not smoke.”
“How many times have you drank with him?”
“Vanzetti does not drink.”
Said Bart, commenting on this evidence: “What a method to find out whether I had been robbing in Bridgewater or delivering fish in Plymouth on the 24th of December, 1919!” Poor Bart, who had to sit in complete silence, watching all this from inside a cage, sternly rebuked on the one occasion when he dared to interrupt! He had to see the rascalities of the prosecution, and the unconvincing quality of the defense--he who, from first to last, understood the case better than any other person interested in it, even the most famous and most expensive of lawyers! He who could read every motive, understand every character, predict every event, and advise, generally in vain, what should be done--he had to sit and watch everything done wrong, and ruin come down upon him like a slow-grinding glacier.
VI
One by one came Italian witnesses, telling the story of Vanzetti’s movements through every hour of that fateful day. Vincenzo Brini had come home from night-work, and got some eels, and chatted with his friend and former boarder. Bastoni, the baker, had refused to rent the horse and wagon; the time was exactly seven-forty-five, because the cordage whistle blew as Bart entered the store, and “that whistle is our bread and butter.” And then Beltrando Brini, twelve years and a half old, bright-eyed and eager, speaking very good English, and thoroughly alert to the meaning of this scene. Trando had first been with Bart about seven-thirty, and had been sent home to hunt out his rubbers from the attic. He had rejoined Bart just as the latter left the baker’s, and told about his disappointment over the horse and wagon, and how he had talked about it every day thereafter. He told how he and Bart had gone from house to house, up one street and down another, delivering their eels, until two-forty that afternoon. He named the streets and the people, described the houses and told of conversations, every detail that lived in his mind.
And Mr. Katzmann took him and spent two hours trying to trap him; making him tell parts of his story over and over, hoping that it would vary; pretending that Trando had said things he hadn’t said; trying to mix him up about the number of hours he had been with Bart--because Trando took out the time he was hunting rubbers and the time he went to lunch, and Mr. Katzmann pretended not to understand this. He asked what did the basket of eels weigh, and could Trando carry it the long route he had described. Trando replied that any one could see, the basket got lighter as he delivered. In the end Katzmann had to give up, and pay Trando the high compliment of calling him such another as Katzmann himself. Turning to the jury he said: “The parents of such an intelligent boy are right to be proud of him, but what he told you from the stand is a lesson learned by heart.”
There came a string of Italian housewives, telling how Vanzetti had sold them eels; eight or ten testified, and there were twice as many more, but the lawyers said it would be a mistake, “the jury will be bored with so much eel-talk.” If they refused to believe a score of Italian witnesses, would they believe two score or three score? The lawyers insisted that the alibi had been proved. But Bart was not satisfied, he was angry because of the efforts of the prosecution to claim that he had had a “cropped mustache.” He pointed to his soft and silky hairs, which could not be got to stand out; there were so few of them, that was why he had always worn his mustaches long; if he had cut them short, there would have been nothing. For eight years he had been going about this town of Plymouth with his walrus mustaches, and everybody knew him; but this jury contained only one Plymouth man, and did not know him. Bart insisted that the truth about his mustache must be proved, and in a passion of indignation he told his lawyers that if they did not do it, he would rise up in court and denounce them for treason to their client.
So at the last moment the Italian “runner” went scurrying to find some of Vanzetti’s friends who knew that his mustaches had never been trimmed. Also Cornelia and Betty and Joe and the Brinis went hunting--and strange was that experience, painful that discovery about human nature, in this terror-ridden town of Cordage. Policemen who knew Vanzetti, and had seen him on the street many times a week for eight years, were afraid for their jobs if they testified as to the length of his mustaches! Contractors who had hired him were afraid for their future contracts! Italian barbers were afraid for their little shops, and their little bootlegging on the side!
In the end they found two policemen who gave nervous and halting testimony that Vanzetti had always worn his walrus mustaches. They found an Italian cement contractor, Christofore, who had employed Vanzetti, and found him a good workman, and had always known him with his mustaches. The prosecuting attorney browbeat this witness, who knew no English, asking him about the mustaches of this person and that--among them of Beltrando Brini, aged twelve and a half years! He asked about the proprietor of one of Plymouth’s big hotels--what kind of a mustache did this gentleman have, and Christofore described it, a small mustache that he was growing. After the noon recess the gentleman was put upon the stand, and exhibited to the jury a completely smooth-shaven face! What was the use of all this mustache-talk, said the district attorney, when they put a mustache on a man who had never had one?
The only time in her life that Cornelia ever heard Vanzetti swear was when he talked about this dirty trick which had been played upon him. For trick it was--whether the hotel proprietor had got shaved especially for his appearance as a witness, or whether it had just happened, that he had got shaved since the Italians had last met him. This much was certain: Christofore had seen this hotel proprietor with a mustache, and so had Vanzetti and many of his friends. The jury could not know, because, with one exception, they were outsiders. But Katzmann and Judge Thayer had sometimes been known to stay at this man’s hotel, and to sit in front of his fire-place in the evening, gossiping with him about what had happened during the day.
VII
Such was the closing scene of this duel of evidence. The jury listened to the genial Mr. Katzmann become suddenly stern and patriotic. “Dagoes stand together!” he exclaimed--and it was easy for them to draw the conclusion that Americans should profit by their example. Then came Judge Thayer, thin-faced, tight-lipped, sharp-voiced, such a great man as these little men of the jury had been taught to reverence. Nothing of the inferiority complex now, nothing of the restless uneasiness, the vulgar craving for attention. It was the great actor now, playing the part which had been his life-study. He knew exactly what instructions to give to these Yankee jurymen, to appeal to their prejudices without seeming to do so. When students of the case sought to ascertain what he had said, it was discovered that the court stenographer’s notes had been burned, and that the copy furnished the defense was strangely lacking in part of the judge’s charge.
The jury retired to deliberate, and carried with them the four shotgun shells which were alleged to have been found upon Vanzetti. They had been identified as ordinary hunting shells, containing bird-shot, which would not be apt to kill a man. But the jurors decided to investigate further, so they opened them, and behold, they were filled with buckshot, which would surely kill a man!
Now there is no point upon which English and American law is more strict than this, that all evidence in a criminal trial must be produced in the presence of the defendant. Vanzetti was entitled to know about those buckshot, and to explain the fact if he could. Maybe he would have taken the stand, maybe Sacco would have done so; maybe they might have wished to ask, who had had the keeping of those shells for the past six months, and what were the chances of their having got mixed up with other shells. There were no identifying marks upon them--but Vanzetti never had a chance to point this out. The jury went ahead and brought in a verdict; and next day one of the jurors happened to meet Judge Thayer in a restaurant, and showed him several of the buckshot. Judge Thayer knew at once that if this story leaked out, the whole expensive trial would go for nothing. He hurried to Katzmann, who came and got the buckshot from the juror before he left the place. Then Katzmann phoned the other jurors to come to his office, and warned them, and the matter was hushed up.
It was half a year later that the facts got out, and then several of the jurors made affidavits about it. An effort was made to invalidate the trial on this ground, but the matter was never argued. If it had been, it would have been argued before Judge Thayer! Whenever during the next seven years the defense discovered new evidence, they would make a motion for a new trial, and under the laws of the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a decision would be handed down by Judge Thayer! When the defense set up a claim that the judge in the Sacco-Vanzetti case had shown prejudice, they made a motion, and it was referred to Judge Thayer, who solemnly listened to arguments, and solemnly handed down a decision to the effect that he had no jurisdiction! Incidentally he solemnly stated that he had no prejudice; and this after he had been going about among his clubmates for several years, saying, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?”
The indictment charged “attempting to rob” and “attempting to kill.” The judge in his instructions had directed that the second charge should be ignored, because the evidence showed that the bandits had merely sought to intimidate the guards; they could hardly have missed their targets with a shotgun at such close range. But after the jurors had opened the shells and found the buckshot, they decided to ignore the judge’s instructions, and brought in a verdict of guilty on both counts. The judge, in an effort to correct this error, took the liberty of ignoring one-half the jury’s verdict and sentencing the prisoner to the maximum penalty of fifteen years in state’s prison for attempting to rob.
The scene in the court-room when the verdict was brought in was a heart-rending one. For ten days the friends of Vanzetti had sat in a tension of anxiety, and now their grief was not to be restrained. Cornelia bowed her head in her arms and wept, while Betty sat, white-faced and quivering, clutching Joe’s hand. The Italian women became hysterical; they screamed and wailed, and the contagion spread from one to another--it was a scene of utter desperation, never anything to equal it. Vanzetti had to stand up and cry to them, “Coraggio! Coraggio!” His guards permitted that much before they shackled his wrists to their own, and led him swiftly out by a side door, and put him into a car and whisked him away to the jail.
Next day when Cornelia and Betty went to see him, for the first time they met an utterly broken man. Again and again he said the words with which he had first greeted them, “My enemy have got me!” He told them what the rest would be--he, the clear-sighted one, the thinker, the analyst of class forces. “I am a convicted. Nick is the friend of a convicted, he is a bandit already, he is a dead man. The jury will say, ‘One of them is bad, why should other be better?’” And when Cornelia pledged her word that she would move heaven and earth to have this verdict set aside, he told her, “You will try, Nonna, but never will be succeeded. It is not for bandit I am convicted, it is for anarchista. If men do sooch trick like you see in court, what is use for hoping?”
Then it was that he swore, because of that mustache trick which had been played by the hotel proprietor. At that time he did not know about the buckshot. He did not know about the Pinkerton reports, which had been kept hidden by the prosecution. He did not know about the witnesses who had been rejected by the police because they did not describe the bandits according to the “theory.” But he did know about the great cordage company, and the losses he had caused it in the strike; so, when Cornelia talked about decent people who would not stand for that “mustache trick,” he laughed a bitter laugh. “You will see, Nonna. They will say, it is for jury to decide. They will say, musta trust jury, musta stand by court.”
VIII
They put Vanzetti in an automobile, and with another car full of armed men in front and a third one bringing up the rear, they drove him to Boston and shut him behind the stone walls of the dingy old Charlestown prison--built in 1805, when the population of Massachusetts was one-tenth what it is now. It stands directly across the river from the city, so placed that on certain mornings when the sun rises clear, the shadow of Bunker Hill monument strikes its walls. An odd turn of fate, that this Italian seeker of liberty should have been convicted within sight of Plymouth Rock, and killed on ground over which Paul Revere had ridden.
They weighed him and measured him and scientifically scrutinized him, and dressed him in faded khaki, and put him in a cell containing an iron cot, and a free space eight feet long and one foot, ten inches wide, with light falling from a narrow slit in the ceiling. In that cell he would stay, fifteen and a half hours out of twenty-four, for the next seven years--except for the holidays of another indictment, trial and sentence. Of the remaining hours a day he would spend seven working in a tailor-shop, and forty minutes in a yard, overcrowded, smoky and dusty.
Soon after the beginning of this régime the Catholic chaplain of the prison came to see him. It is a Catholic maxim--therefore a prison maxim--that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”; and even an alleged atheist is a human being, and may respond to kindness and sympathy. The good Father Murphy talked to him, not about religion, but about general matters; and then, having got on friendly terms, remarked, quite casually, “Tell me, Vanzetti, who drove the car at South Braintree?” Thereupon the alleged atheist rose up with dignity, and asked for the privilege of being alone in his cell, and the consolations of organized, institutionalized and subsidized religion were missing from the remainder of his life.
Instead he sought the consolations of literature. He wrote a long letter, pouring out his soul--and incidentally revealing that he was coming to feel at home in a new language; he no longer had to look up every word.
“I was just thinking what I would to do for past the long days jail: I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you when you will be free. Just at that time I received your letter.
“Thanks to you from the bottom of my heart for your confidence in my innocence; I am so. I did not spittel a drop of blood, or steal a cent in all my life. A little knowledge of the past; a sorrowful experience of the life itself had gave to me some ideas very different from those of many other uman beings. But I wish to convince my fellow-men that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happiness in the world. I preached: I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social wealth would belong to every umane creatures, so well as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for a insurrection.
“The insurrection, the great movements of the soul do not need dollars. It need love, light, spirit of sacrifice, ideas, conscience, instincts. It need more conscience, more hope and more goodness. And all this blassing things can be seeded, awoked, growed up in the heart of man in many ways, but not by robbery and murder for robbery.
“I like you to know that I think to Italy, so speaking. From the universal family, turning to this humble son, I will say that, as far as my needs, wish and aspirations call, I do not need to become a bandit. I like the teaching of Tolstoi, Saint Francesco and Dante. I like the example of Cincinnati and Garibaldi. The epicurean joi do not like to me. A little roof, a field, a few books and food is all what I need. I do not care for money, for leisure, for mondane ambition. And honest, even in this world of lambs and wolves I can have those things. But my father has many field, houses, garden. He deal in wine and fruits and granaries. He wrote to me many times to come back home, and be a business man. Well, this supposed murderer had answered to him that my conscience do not permit to me to be a business man and I will gain my bread by work his field.
“And more: The clearness of mind, the peace of the conscience, the determination and force of will, the intelligence, all, all what make the man feeling to be a part of the life, force and intelligence of the universe, will be brake by a crime. I know that, I see that, I tell that to everybody. Do not violate the law of nature, if you do not want to be a miserable. I remember: it was a night without moon, but starry. I sit alone in the darkness, I was sorry, very sorry. With the face in my hands I began to look at the stars. I feel that my soul want goes away from my body, and I have had to make an effort to keep it in my chest. So, I am the son of Nature, and I am so rich that I do not need any money. And for this they say I am a murderer and will condemn me to death. Death? It is nothing. Abbominium is cruel thing.
“Now you advise me to study. Yes, it would be a good thing. But I do not know enough this language to be able to make any study through it. I will like to read Longfellow’s, Paine’s, Franklin’s and Jefferson’s works, but I cannot. I would like to study mathematics, physics, history and science, but I have not a sufficient elementary school to begin such studies, especially the two first and I cannot study without work, hard physical work, sunshine and winds; free, blassing wind. There is no flame without the atmospheric gasses; and no light of genius in any soul without they communion with Mother Nature.
“I hope to see you very soon; I will tell you more in the matter. I will write something, a meditation perhaps and name it: Waiting for the Hanger. I have lost the confidence in the justice of man. I mean in what is called so; not of course, of that sentiment which lay in the heart of man, and that no infernal force will be strong enough to soffocate it. Your assistance and the assistance of so many good men and women, had made my cross much more light. I will not forget it.
“I beg your pardon for such a long letter, but I feel so reminiscent to you that hundred pages would not be sufficient to extern my sentiments and feelings. I am sure you will excuse me. Salve.
“Give to all my best regards and wishes, Your
“BARTHOLOMEW VANZETTI.”
IX
Cornelia and Betty and Joe were back in Boston, the first two having been hurriedly summoned for the funeral of Great-aunt Priscilla. It is highly inconvenient, belonging to one of these big families; there are so many funerals, weddings and christenings, which it would be unthinkable not to attend.
An extraordinary thing had happened to this aged female Brahmin in the closing months of her life; the bacillus of eccentricity, which lurks in all Boston blue blood, had suddenly flared into activity. Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell, spinster, aged eighty-seven, stiff as a ramrod and model of every known or conceivable kind of propriety, had suddenly fallen under the spell of an Episcopal faith-healer, who was traveling about the country insisting that every bishop, even every country parson, could demonstrate the living presence of God, work miracles, and stop the slow dribble of Episcopalians into Christian Science.
Great-aunt Priscilla almost succeeded in arising and taking up her bed and walking, in spite of the complete anchylosis of her spine; she insisted that she would have done it, had it not been that her relatives persisted in reminding her of her great age--a “negative suggestion.” She took up the habit of being what she called “instant in prayer,” which meant that she was liable to start talking to God at any moment. It was embarrassing to her relatives and friends, because of course no one likes to interrupt a talk with God, and feels something of an interloper even to sit and listen to it. Great-aunt Priscilla summoned her brother, Abner, over whom she had great authority, because he was only eighty-five years old, and tried to persuade him to appeal for a cure of his deafness. But Abner argued that if God had meant him not to be deaf, God wouldn’t have made him deaf; and this was a relief to the family, because it frightened them to imagine Abner becoming “instant in prayer,” with that deaf man’s voice which filled the biggest house in Boston.
And now it was discovered that Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell, spinster, had left a letter asserting that the Episcopal service for the burial of the dead was a denial of the faith of Jesus, and specifying that she was to be buried from Trinity Church with the services for Easter Morning! It was a problem for authorities in ecclesiastical etiquette; but to defy a Thornwell was unthinkable, so the rector and his assistants finally decided that One to whom a thousand years were as a day might conceivably accept any day as Easter. There were no lilies on the market, but there were plenty of roses, and the occasion created almost as much excitement as a vaudeville show that was likely to be raided by the police. It was as if everybody were secretly wondering whether the Lord might give some sign of his displeasure at this setting back of the church calendar for three months. But apparently the Lord understood Boston, a city which is governed by the old, and especially the old ladies.
They were all at this service, even though they had to motor a hundred miles from the country. They wore their black dresses and bonnets, some new and shiny, some old and rusty--but never forget that the rustiest might be the richest. To wear a dowdy dress and a mangy fur tippet might mean one who was able to scorn ostentation--just as illiteracy in an English duke means that he is above the laws of grammar. One of these old ladies might dispose of millions upon a whim, and her lightest word was social law. They sat in family pews which had belonged to them since the great brown-stone church was built; beside them the younger generations--sweet-faced ladies, better dressed, and oh, so neat and clean, gazing with rapt faces at a fairy-story setting of white roses and candles and stained-glass-window saints, and a procession of toddlers in white robes, singing in cherubs’ voices to the rolling music of four organs in four different corners. How beautiful it all was, and how serene--and how amazing to come to it out of that world of lies and cruelty which Cornelia and Betty had just left!
Look about you at these perfect Anglo-Saxon faces--not a foreign one among them--so elegant and so satisfied! Note the costumes, polished to the last pin, and chosen with impeccable taste--broadcloth and patent leather and spats for the men, veils and laces, silk stockings and delicate scents, flowers and unostentatious jewelry for the ladies! Note the soft, cultivated voices, the gracious manners, rehearsed for centuries! Note the ancient formulas, the ritual established since eternity; the prayers and anthems rising to an Anglo-Saxon God, untainted by His temporary sojourn in a Hebrew womb. Bland saints in all the windows, with golden haloes and bright-colored robes, untainted by contact with the fishing industry. A rector who was the last word in Back Bay fashion, the Harvard manner grafted upon a mediæval ecclesiastic.
While the sweet-faced ladies gazed up at him adoringly, he pronounced a little eulogy upon the virtues of the dear departed, whose faith and funds had nourished the church for two generations and a half. It wasn’t customary to make speeches at church funerals; but since this was an Easter Sunday service, a different rule might well apply. The rector referred to the recent new fervors of the deceased, a matter which required tact, because this rector had got his training in days when the theological department of the university was separate from the medical. He made an excursion into the field of modern thought, revealing that he had heard of the science of astronomy and knew that the earth was small; more amazing yet, he gave up the Virgin birth, saying that we did not know just what had happened on that occasion, and perhaps would never know. It sounded like a hint at some scandal in the Holy Family, and would have made a scandal in Episcopal circles in other cities: but not in Boston, where everything is far advanced, and Trinity Church has to compete with King’s Chapel, which is Unitarian, and even more intellectual, and if possible more fashionable.
X
The funeral had the effect of bringing Cornelia and Betty back into the family, and they heard the latest gossip. Alice Winters was still supporting her “little theater,” but very unhappy, because her poet, supposed to be storming Parnassus, was getting drunk every night, and neglecting his muse for a brazen, yellow-headed flapper. Clara Scatterbridge was getting stout, and the best reducing experts could not solve her problem; she concealed the dire truth from these advisers, but not from the Argus eyes of the family--that she kept an assortment of sweets in her boudoir, and nibbled chocolates and candied fruits all day.
Great-uncle Abner was very melancholy now; he was the last of the old generation, he said, and his time would come soon--which was certainly a negative suggestion! He could no longer remember the chess moves he had made last week, and his son Quincy was losing games on purpose, in order to keep up the old man’s spirits. Abner had gone to stay with the Scatterbridges, because he liked to be with the children; each of the younger ones had a donkey to ride, and Abner had one too, and rode at the head of the procession, all over the estate--a most laughable sight. But everybody had to keep a sober face, because if you laughed at anything whatever, the old man would think you were laughing at him, and would take ineradicable offense.
Deborah came to the little apartment to have lunch with her mother and daughter; and presently it transpired that the Argus eyes of the family had observed Betty going about town with a young man by the name of Joseph Jefferson Randall. Who was he? A grandson of the actor? Betty said no, he was one of the Randalls of Pakenham Court House, Virginia, and a nephew of Senator Randall, now ambassador to one of the South American countries.
“Don’t you think, dear, you had better let your mother meet him?” inquired Deborah, mildly.
“No, Mother, I don’t,” said the younger generation. “Joe is much less radical than I, but he always says what he thinks, and so he would make you very unhappy.”
“Don’t you say what you think, my daughter?”
“Practically never, Mother. I bite my tongue off several times every hour.”
Deborah said no more, but Betty knew what she would do--and so did Deborah. What are the secret, underground channels of the blue-bloods, by which they find out whatever they wish to know? Do they have indexes and card-files, like the Quaker attorney-general, so that they can telegraph and ascertain who is who, and what are his family scandals? Anyhow, the next time Deborah came to town, she knew that Joe’s father was a “drinking man,” whose wife had divorced him. Fortunately Deborah hadn’t found out that Joe himself was married; but she imagined the worst, because divorces are a matter of heredity, like cancer, she said.
Deborah’s hope was to persuade Cornelia and Betty to accompany Betty’s older sister to Europe for the rest of the summer--since young Priscilla’s wedding had been put off by the death of her great-aunt, whose namesake she was. Failing in that, Deborah’s next campaign was to persuade the pair to come out and spend the summer at the Rupert Alvin palace on the North Shore. Deborah was lonely, she said, pathetically; her husband had so many cares just now, owing to the collapse of business. Deborah even went so far as to promise that Cornelia and Betty would be free to believe and say what they pleased, and she would not argue with them--a most remarkable “come-down” for so haughty and stern a lady.
Anything to get Betty away from the companionship of that dangerous young Virginian! To divert her with yachting and tennis and lawn-parties and picnics, in the company of sound and wholesome graduates of the Harvard “Gold Coast,” their blood free from the hereditary virus of divorce! But both Cornelia and Betty were obdurate; they were going to stay cooped up in that hot little apartment all July and August, to consult lawyers and organize committees and raise funds for the defense of two anarchist bandits!
XI
The men of the Thornwell family indeed had their hands full that summer. The expected post-war collapse had come--or rather it had been brought about by those who realized that prices had got too high, and that “deflation” was necessary. Naturally, these men wanted to deflate everybody but themselves, and having the power, they did so. The heads of the great banking groups, of whom Rupert Alvin was one of the most careful and conscientious, had devised what they called the “Federal Reserve System,” a chain of banks financed by the government and run by the bankers; its function was to enable the great bankers to save themselves in times of panic, by issuing vast sums of new money, and lending it to the big industries, whose stocks and bonds are the mainstay of banking credit. That meant that when a panic came, it was the little fellows and the outsiders who were “deflated,” while the big bankers and their friends sat on a rock and waited for the storm to blow over.
Having this power in their hands, Rupert and his associates in the course of that summer of 1920 had their Federal Reserve banks suddenly raise the discount rates in the farming country; the result of which was to force the dumping of the country’s farm produce on the market. Prices collapsed to a point where most of the farmers were bankrupt, and in the Northwest there were whole counties with every single farm sold for taxes. Meantime the big industrialists of the East, having bank-credit, were able to hold their products, and close down their plants and wait.
But if Rupert and his Pilgrim National crowd thought they were going to have a happy time riding that storm, they learned a sad lesson. The saying that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, applies to the kings of modern credit as well as to those of Shakespearean drama. It was as if Rupert were the guardian of a huge honey-pot, and had the job of apportioning its contents to all the flies in New England. They swarmed about him, making a quite terrifying buzzing--and it was a fact that many of them had stings, more or less dangerous, and threatened to use them, and sometimes did. Impossible for a great banker to sleep with all that clamor in his ears! Impossible for any member of his family to sleep--because there were lady-flies as well as gentleman, and they too could buzz and sting!
To drop metaphors, it was a fact that a small group of bankers had to decide, during that panic, which industries of the community were to be saved and which were to go to the wall. And needless to say, in a place like Boston, it was not a question of vulgar material efficiency, it was a question of social status. Who was who, and who was married to whom, and what was the relative blueness of this blood and that? The difference between the attitudes of Boston and New York in this matter are set forth in a story which all financial men delight to tell, about the New York banker who wrote to a Boston friend, saying that he had a position for a capable young man. The Boston banker sent one, with a letter explaining that he was a great-nephew of the late Josiah Quincy Thornwell, a nephew of John Quincy Thornwell and of Rupert Alvin, a cousin of the Cabots, and so on. Whereupon the vulgar New Yorker dismissed the applicant and sent a telegram, reading: “I did not want a young man for breeding purposes, I wanted one for banking.”
The emergency now was the most desperate the Boston bluebloods had faced for a long time. It was no mere play question, like belonging to a Sewing Circle, or getting your daughters into Camp Putnam and the Friday dances, or your sons into the “Porcellian” and the “Alpha Delta Phi.” No, it was a question of your very life-blood, that privilege upon which your family existence was based. So you forgot your good manners, and fought as your ancestors had fought, in the days before they had any manners. You threatened and stormed, and raked up ancient, long-buried family skeletons, and made life miserable for a great banker who had for years been suffering from high blood pressure, and had been warned by Morrow, eminent authority upon diseases of the rich.
Rupert became morose under the strain. His pink and purple bulges, which had seemed to be radiating geniality, now took on the aspect of a threatened explosion. He fell to grumbling about human nature. Nobody cared about anything but money; friendship, family pride, honor, all were gone. He would carry his burden of sorrow for days, and suddenly it would become too heavy, and he would dump it in some quite unsuitable place. An elderly widow, a friend of Cornelia’s, sought him as adviser about the purchase of bonds, and the great and busy head of the Pilgrim National Bank kept the astonished lady for half an hour while he impressed upon her the solemn duty of guarding her property. “Hold on to it! You have nothing else--absolutely nothing! When it is gone you will discover that nobody respects you, your friends have no use for you. Nothing counts to-day but money!” The widow-lady might have had her feelings hurt, but she understood that it was impersonal, a revelation of the banker-soul.
But for the most part Rupert kept his pessimistic thoughts to pour out upon his spouse in the privacy of their chamber, after the lights were out, and they lay in the chaste retirement of their twin beds, under brocaded blue silk counterpanes. He would expatiate upon the abnormal greediness of this one and that, and after he had begun to snore, Deborah would lie still and petition the Lord to soften the hearts of the greedy ones, and spare her good and noble husband, who was sacrificing his very life to preserve sound and conservative banking in New England--which meant, of course, banking under the control of the Pilgrim National group.
XII
There are some whose claims were not to be questioned. Unthinkable that any Thornwell should go to the wall, or any one who could claim kinship, even by marriage. Those huge Thornwell Mills had to have many millions of credit, to enable them to store their manufactured products, and turn off their operatives to starve. And of course they got it; you have only to imagine the hysterics that Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge would have had in the boudoir of Deborah Thornwell Alvin, if Rupert had dreamed of refusing! John Quincy Thornwell needed a small fortune, for a shipping deal he had been putting through on the side; and he got it from Rupert’s bank. Rupert also needed a fortune, for some of those subsidiary plants which he and Henry Cabot Winters had taken away from Jerry Walker, and had kept all to themselves. Rupert got this money from the Fifth National Bank, of which John Quincy Thornwell was president. So these big fellows shifted millions about from their right-hand pockets to their left-hand pockets, and shrewd lawyers like Henry Cabot Winters were there to tell them exactly how to do it, so they need never worry if some spy told on them, and caused a government bank-examiner to drop in.
They knew that their rivals had spies on them, because they had spies on their rivals. And when these spies would bring in reports of what was going on, Henry Cabot Winters and the other legal spiders would be called in to consider how to meet the rivals’ moves. If it was discovered that some little fellow, having less expensive legal talent, had slipped up somewhere, and done something which the law did not allow, then was the time to use your pull with the bank-examiner, whom you had caused to be appointed a few years ago, and whom you were going to make into a bank-president in the course of another year or two--after he had completed the job of putting your rivals out of business.
That was the way the blue-bloods kept the banking industry a strictly blue-blooded affair. The foreigners, and especially the Jews, had got into everything else. For decades they had been boycotted as department-store owners, but now several of the biggest and most successful stores were in the hands of Jews. They had got clothing and wool and leather; they had the theaters, and were breaking into law and medicine--but they were never going to get the banking-business, not if Rupert Alvin and the rest of the “high hats” could prevent it. And they could!
At this time there was a Jewish banker who had broken into the reserve. Simon Swig was his name--which in itself was enough to demonstrate the impropriety of allowing a Jew to become directing head of a bank! He had come into the country as a common immigrant, and now had got hold of the Tremont Trust Company, an honorable institution, and was running it on bargain-day principles--paying five and a half per cent on savings accounts, and advertising the fact, which was unethical, but brought in the business. He was a rascal, so the blue-bloods said, and doubtless it was true, but you had to remember that in high finance rascality is a question of degree. The respectable bankers were breaking any number of laws, but having the banking authorities in their clubs, they were not punished. Neither were they exposed, because they had the newspapers, and their “news bureaus,” run by large stout subsidized “experts”--whose expertness lay in making the public believe whatever Rupert Alvin and men of his sort desired.
In the course of that chain of troubles, the state bank-examiners swooped down one morning and tacked a notice on the door of the Tremont Trust Company, to the effect that it was closed and forbidden to do business. And that was all there was to it--the Tremont Trust stayed closed, and it didn’t do any business. If it had been a “blue-blood” bank, it would have been “tided over”; instead of which it was turned over to a “blue-blood” receiver, and paid its savings depositors a hundred cents on the dollar--which seemed rather to justify the claim of Simon Swig that it had been sound all along.
XIII
What started the trouble that summer was the problem of Charles Ponzi. An Italian immigrant who had come to America about the same time as Vanzetti, and with even less money in his pocket, Ponzi, too, had washed dishes for a living; but he had not wasted his time dreaming about “joostice”--no, he was the sort of immigrant America wants, he had dreamed of making a million dollars in a week, and he had done it. He discovered a curious situation in international exchange, so he said; it was possible to buy postal coupons in Vienna, and sell them at a higher rate in Switzerland, and thus you could turn a thousand dollars into twenty-five thousand. It made good advertising copy, and was no more false than what the big bankers were telling the public about their Federal Reserve System. Anyhow, Ponzi opened a dingy little office in School Street, quite in the correct Boston tradition--for many of the big New England corporations had dingy little offices in some of those two-hundred-year-old houses in dark and narrow streets which had been laid out by cows.
Charles Ponzi advertised that he would sell you a forty-five-day certificate, which you were free to redeem at any time, but if you would wait till the end of the forty-five days, you would get fifty per cent interest. The tidings spread among the million inhabitants of Boston, and all those persons who cherished the dream of getting rich without working came to buy certificates--which meant that Ponzi had approximately a million customers. Such a mob of people tried to get into his dingy office all at once that the police reserves had to be called out to keep them from being crushed to death. In that suffocating room you saw rich ladies in silks and jewels, newsboys, street peddlers, workingwomen with babies in their arms, scrubwomen clutching in their hands the earnings of half a lifetime on their knees. They all wanted to give it to Ponzi, and he took it, and fulfilled the immigrant’s dream by buying himself a palace in the country, with the most expensive custom-built limousine in Boston to bring him to town.
Ponzi was imperiling the savings banks by causing the public to draw out all their money; he was buying into the big trust companies, and in danger of becoming a real banker. Worse yet, he was filling the public mind with unrest, talking recklessly to the newspapers. He kept saying that in making a hundred per cent profit in three months he was merely doing what many big bankers were doing--the difference being that he was giving the public fifty percent, whereas the big bankers gave only five percent. If any one were to say how near to the truth that was, the person would not be believed, so it would be useless to say it.
The bank-examiners and district attorneys got busy, and filled the papers with rumors that Ponzi was about to be arrested. It was difficult to take action because the ex-dishwasher was now worth about twelve million dollars, and actually had five millions cash in Boston banks, and nobody so rich had ever been arrested in New England. Moreover, he had hired a very able lawyer, who was later on disbarred as a “fixer”; he paid that lawyer a million dollars before he got through, and would undoubtedly have got off, had not Rupert and his crowd been so determined to get him out of the way.
As often occurs with financial storms, this one got out of control, and brought down several institutions: the Cosmopolitan Trust, the Prudential Trust, the Fidelity Trust--it was a rollcall of respectability. It so happened that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had several hundred thousand dollars in these banks, and several counties had as much. The city of Cambridge, the home of Harvard University, just across the river, was stuck for half a million--the greater part having been got by a trick played upon the city treasurer a few months before the crash. All this caused a terrific scandal, and a long train of consequences most distressing to Rupert Alvin and his friends. For the examinations of the banks disclosed that many of the state legislators had been borrowing money without any security, and had used this money to buy stocks in public utilities, while passing a bill to triple their value.
Not so long ago the Pilgrim National crowd had driven the Boston Elevated Railway onto the financial rocks, and taken it over; then, in order to put it back on its feet, they had jammed through the legislature a so-called Public Control bill, whereby the Commonwealth guaranteed dividends to the Elevated stockholders, which made necessary a ten-cent fare. So here was the blue-blooded and high-hatted and in all ways ineffable Rupert Alvin playing Santa Claus and angel to the politicians and legislators of his Commonwealth! The disclosure was half a year in the future, but that only meant the prolonging of Rupert’s worry; for of course he knew what was in the records of the banks, and he knew that when the public has lost a lot of money and become furiously angry, it is much harder to keep news out of the papers.
XIV
Another trouble looming, if possible even more serious! Jerry Walker had come back from his nervous breakdown, and had found out some details of the intrigue by which Rupert and Henry Cabot Winters had persuaded the other bankers to join in taking his ten-million-dollar properties. Jerry had consulted lawyers, and made a deal with one of them, a bristling little bull-dog of a man who had taken many a million away from big bankers on previous occasions. Now, under the law, Jerry had a right to put questions to Rupert, as to what Rupert had done to him, and Rupert was compelled to answer, under penalty of being considered to have admitted his guilt! So there would come to the Pilgrim National crowd and their lawyers long letters full of questions, agonizingly direct and to the point; and there would be conferences of great financial and legal personages, and private conferences in Rupert’s study late at night, in which Rupert and his brother-in-law would go over what they had done to Jerry, and many times wish they had done it a little differently!
Betty Alvin found out about this, because she ran into Lucile Walker in the lobby of one of the hotels. They had not met since Betty’s departure for Europe, more than a year ago; so they rushed into each other’s arms, girl fashion, and then adjourned to the tea-room to talk things over. Lucile had solved her financial and other problems in the good old established way; she was now Mrs. Percy G. Townsend, her husband a manufacturer of some kind of electrical equipment. He was young and enthusiastic, and so was his wife, and they were going to work hard and build up a business, and then some day one of the big banking groups would take it over.
Betty told a little about her adventures in Hungary and Russia and Plymouth, Massachusetts; after which there was an embarrassed pause on Lucile’s part, and she said, “I suppose you know what Papa is doing?” When Betty said she didn’t, Lucile told about the suit that was coming; and when Betty said that she was not taking her father’s side in his business fights, Lucile told more of the story. It was going to mean a dreadful lot of publicity for all of them, because those big State Street bankers would be put on the witness stand and questioned about the deals they had made, and how they had divided Mr. Walker’s properties. Betty said she had told her mother that she would never touch any of that money; just now she was wrestling with the problem whether she ought to take any money at all from her father. She was able to earn her own living, and wanted to--but also she wanted to give her time to organizing a Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and she couldn’t earn a living at that.
Betty went home and told her grandmother; and so when Cornelia happened to meet Henry Cabot Winters, she was able to pose as a woman of the world, in touch with secret news channels. Henry, of course, had no trouble in guessing how she knew, and there developed a curious situation. A couple of years ago he had been indignant at the idea that Jerry Walker might be using Cornelia as a means of getting information from the Thornwells; but now he wanted to use Cornelia to get information as to the plans of Jerry Walker! He went so far as to propose a “swap”: if Cornelia would find out all she could from the Walkers, Henry would use his inside connections to help Cornelia’s beloved bandits. He would get in touch with the officials, and find out what their plans were, and might even be able to find some way to get those rascals off.
Somehow this tickled Cornelia’s funny-bone, and she burst into laughter. “You and Rupert must be badly scared,” she said; and after Henry had made sure that she was not going to talk to the Walkers about it, he admitted that they were. It was not that they had done anything wrong--nobody in Boston ever does that--but it was going to be such a mess, to have the letters and telegrams and confidential memoranda of a great banking project spread out in the newspapers.
“Can’t you clean out your files?” asked Cornelia, with a twinkle in her eye. He answered that it wasn’t so easy as it sounded, because one document referred to the next, and there were copies in a dozen different banks. If you took out very much, your employees were bound to know it, and that exposed you to spying and blackmail. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!
XV
Troubles! Troubles! Even in far-off Italy, that summer and fall, people were occupied in making troubles for Rupert Alvin and his associates. The big bankers had filled up their vaults with the gold-embossed and red-sealed financial promises of European governments; and vain was the hope to save themselves by unloading this paper on the public. Because after a bank customer had bought it, he generally came back to leave it as security up to eighty percent of its market value; and how could Rupert refuse to lend money on a bond which he had certified as an investment for widows and orphans? So it had come about that every time a European premier sneezed, Rupert Alvin jumped in his sleep; when the anarchists paraded in Milan or Turin and waved their black flags, Rupert couldn’t sleep at all.
That summer the radical labor unions of Italy made their long expected coup--moving in and taking possession of the principal steel and machine plants of the country. But having got in, they didn’t know what to do next, because they could not turn a wheel of the plants without coal, and the coal had to come from England or America, in English or American ships, upon English or American credit. Were English or American coal men going to extend credit to Italian anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, communist-anarchists and left-wing socialists? The coal men of England and America, like all the other big business men of those countries, were going to do what their Rupert Alvins told them; and the Rupert Alvins said thumbs down on Reds. So the Italian workers had to make peace with their masters, and give up the plants; and then it was necessary for the masters to organize a counter-revolutionary government, to break up the labor unions and kill off the leaders. To do that they had to have the machinery of reaction and slaughter--and where else should they come for it but to America?
So it happened that Rupert Alvin, in the midst of all his troubles with Ponzi, and Simon Swig, and the half dozen closed banks, and the threatened Elevated Railway scandal, and the hiding of evidence in the Jerry Walker case, and the unhappiness over Betty and Cornelia--with all this nightmare-load riding his shoulders, Rupert Alvin had to interview agents of the banking and manufacturing interests of Italy, and listen to plans for the coup d’état which was to turn that country into a dictatorship of big capital. No possible way to avoid it--unless all the money that had been loaned to Italy during and since the war was to be lost. The bankers of Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Chicago had to get together and do for Italy what they had already done for Hungary and Roumania and Czechoslovakia and Finland and Esthonia and Latvia and Lithuania--so many miserable little bonded states that it gave a hundred percent American a headache to learn the names.
And meantime Bartolomeo Vanzetti paced his cell, in the space eight feet by one and a half allotted him for pacing. He knew what was happening, because his friends brought him a few facts, and he could reconstruct the rest, with that clear mind which understood social forces. He knew that it meant the ruin of all his hopes, all chance of freedom for the peasants and wage-slaves of Italy for years, perhaps decades. He knew what the American bankers would do; he foretold how, when the time came to float the loan, they would have the newspapers bought and the propaganda ready, and would carry the mass of Italian-Americans into reaction with them. Meantime they had Vanzetti in jail, where he was safe--and they were going to see to it that he stayed!