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Title: Thirteen days
Author: Jeannette Augustus Marks
Release date: March 9, 2026 [eBook #78153]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1929
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78153
Credits: Shawn Carraher and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIRTEEN DAYS ***
THIRTEEN DAYS
THIRTEEN DAYS
BY
JEANNETTE MARKS
AUTHOR OF “GENIUS AND DISASTER”
ALBERT & CHARLES BONI
New York : : 1929
+Copyright 1929+
JEANNETTE MARKS
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. +The End+ 1
II. +The Beginning+ 18
III. +The March of Sorrow+ 44
IV. +Roman Holiday+ 64
V. +Out of Chaos+ 78
+Appendix A+ 97
+Appendix B+ 101
+Appendix C+ 108
+Bibliographic Note+ 121
+Index+ 125
THIRTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER I
THE END
“Oh, few faint voices bravely asking ‘Why?’
You pass like whispers in the roaring play
Of madmen marching to a holiday.
We know. We know, why bound to death they lie.”
+David P. Berenberg.+[1]
There in the newspapers on that morning of August ninth, 1927, was the
appeal from the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee to the “rank and file”
of artists, authors, teachers (including college professors) and other
kinds of professional men and women to come to headquarters in Boston.
How many of the rank and file of professors and authors like myself
would be there? For me, behind, lay seven years of a working friendship
with the Committee.
That noon of August ninth on the shore of Lake Champlain a
budge-budge-not struggle went on for more than an hour. If I went, what
could I do? Would I not be merely one more person under foot? At such
moments were there not always many to go? Had I not--as had so many
others with more influence--done what I could over the seven long years
to help the Committee in its great work of educating the public to see
that the issue was justice to these two Italians, one a shoe worker,
the other a fish peddler! And now that the work seemed, one way or
another, really over, why go?
But would there be many of my kind? Had not the report of President
Lowell, President Stratton and Judge Grant “sand-bagged” the
educational world? At least if I did go, there would be nothing left
undone to be regretted some day. And this was the ultimate and perhaps
the last thing any of us could do for them, for Sacco and Vanzetti were
to be executed some time after midnight on the tenth.
On arrival in Boston the next morning, I found that a taxi taken
from any station, any public stand or any hotel brought a man up
to book your destination and the number of your taxi. Only from my
Club was this ceremony omitted. A traffic survey then under way in
Boston may or may not have been responsible for such a thirst to know
every destination. At least on that day in that city where once I
had prepared for college, while I dreamed about Emerson and Margaret
Fuller and met such great liberals as Colonel Higginson and Professor
John Fiske, it was impossible not to be amused at the anxiety my
destinations must, over some eighteen hours, have caused those booking
men employed by “protected” Boston, for I came and went steadily
morning, afternoon and night among the very places which were taboo
and under guard. It would also have been impossible not to have
enjoyed the Boston police on that day. They were such nice-looking,
well-dressed men who but gained in interest by the fact that so many of
them seemed frightened. The officers on guard at the door of Defense
Headquarters regarded me with a suspicious eye.
Climbing the two flights of narrow stairs at 256 Hanover Street,
passing through a group of people too large for the narrow passageway
and the spare, bare outer office, I found myself in the midst of
“Headquarters.” On the walls was one poster often repeated: +Justice
is the Issue!+ Side by side with this quiet statement were some of
the “unguarded” remarks made out of court by Judge Webster Thayer. As
I stood there, a stranger among strangers, I saw many men and a few
women. Among the women was one who was elderly. She was dressed in gray
and the face was good to look at. This--as I discovered later--was Mrs.
Glendower Evans, for whom both Sacco and Vanzetti felt love similar to
the love they gave their mothers. There were a number of younger women,
and they were as well-clad and as well set up as the Boston police.
What more could one woman say of other women than that! Some of the men
were small and swart. Some of the men were tall and fair. But of the
exploded Lombroso criminal type who, in popular opinion, throw bombs,
not one was seen,--not in the whole day long.
Then one of the tall, fair men, having a name well known to the art
world, asked if there were anything he could do for me. When I inquired
for Mary Donovan he said she was in the inner office and he would tell
her I was there. I said no, not to call her, I would wait till she came
out. Almost immediately Miss Donovan came out, a fine-looking dark Celt
whose pale face had in it not only strength but also warmth.
When, a few minutes later, I told her my name, Mary Donovan grasped my
hand, saying “I am so glad you have come!” and sent me into the inner
office to wait for her.
In that inner office were four people: two men and two women who
received me politely. One of the men gave me a chair. But, except for
the sending and answering of telephone calls and the coming and going
of telegraph and other messengers, the quiet that reigned in the office
when I entered continued.
The man who had given me a seat--his seat--sat down on an unopened bale
of pamphlets and I noticed the slender, rather large, scrupulously
clean hands resting quietly on his knees; the wide, dark, gentle eyes;
the head becoming bald; the brow criss-crossed with suffering and with
care; the strangely delicate, firm lips and chin. Where had I seen
that look of childlike spirituality before? Ah, yes, ridiculous but a
fact: in Italian painting on many a celebrated bambino face.
The other man, who went on steadily writing at the center desk around
which we were, represented a type more familiar to me. The homely face,
the massive head, the thick abundant hair, the look of concentration
as he worked, young still, already he resembled a responsible type of
American journalist. Who was he?
At the stenographic desk before the one window of that inner office
sat a pretty “child” working silently and rapidly addressing envelope
after envelope, for the new Bulletin of the Committee was just off the
press, containing among other articles reprints of noble editorials
from the _Springfield Republican_ together with a passionate editorial
by Heywood Broun in the _New York World_. The “child’s” hair was a halo
about her head and her features were cameo cut. She paused in her rapid
work only to take or to give a telephone call.
The other woman, beside whom I was sitting, was older than the “child”
but still young. Except for the man who had given me his seat and
myself the grave beings in that little office were all young. And the
quiet woman at my side with her lovely uncropped auburn hair, the
somewhat oval features, had in her face not only the still look of
suffering, but also the only indestructible youth,--that of goodness.
As about that inner office, so about her was an atmosphere of stillness
and of waiting. Except that she crumpled paper occasionally and that
she had a dry cough from time to time, she made no motions and no sound.
Who were they all?
From beginning to end of that day at Headquarters, whose passing was
noted the world over and on which more newspapers were sold than on
any other day in history, in that spare, shabby center of the Defense
struggle, it was plain from the instant those offices were entered that
every dollar had been spent on the building up of public opinion and on
fees for defense, and that not a penny had been wasted.
Up in the State House on Beacon Hill there were “banks” of telephone
and telegraph wires installed, to send Sacco-Vanzetti news over the
whole world; and at Charlestown was another “bank” of wires which were
to flash the Death House scene to the ends of the earth. Here in the
dingy office in the very center of this fight for justice, an office
from which had come and would come the legal fees to pay for success or
failure, there was but one wire which whistled or faded as calls were
received or sent. Why this interference in such a place on such a day?
And then Mary Donovan came back, and I met those with whom I had
been sitting in the little office. He of the gentle eyes was Aldino
Felicani, the devoted personal friend of the two condemned men, the
spirit behind the entire movement, and the treasurer of the Committee.
The young man with the shaggy hair and massive head who was still
steadily writing was Gardner Jackson. And the woman with the lovely
uncropped auburn hair and the intelligent, good face was Rosa Sacco.
Apparently the seven years I had “served” Old Testamentwise, in
obscure, if faithful, work for the Defense had won me in the minds of
some of the Committee a right of friendship which I did not, I know,
deserve. And it became my privilege to spend in close association some
of the most momentous days in the Committee’s history.
As that day “wore on”--never was phrase more descriptive of the
fixation of tragedy there symbolized and apparent--groups came and
went in the outer office. The Defense Committee had done everything
possible to secure a hall where these groups from New York City,
Philadelphia, and from towns in many near-by states could meet. But
not a landlord in Boston would rent them a hall. Finally a church was
secured. Immediately police and patrol wagon were posted there. Groups
came and went at Defense Headquarters, asking what to do, asking for
instructions. Defense Headquarters had no place to offer them for
meeting except the church or Socialist Headquarters at 21 Essex Street.
The day before thirty-nine men and women had been arrested, among them
Alfred Baker Lewis, the Massachusetts State Secretary for the Socialist
Party, while engaged in silent picketing outside the State House. The
groups now coming in also wished to picket. In their numbers were men
and women well known in art and in letters: Lola Ridge, Art Shields,
Ruth Hale, the wife of Heywood Broun; Isaac Don Levine, whose articles
on Soviet Russia published in the _New Republic_ had been the first
to tell the American public about the new Russia; Edward H. James, a
nephew of William James; John Dos Passos, and many others.
For a reply to the question as to when and where they should picket,
Defense Headquarters sent them on to Alfred Baker Lewis at Socialist
Headquarters. It was apparent that Defense Headquarters felt that
their own work lay in the hour to hour messenger service and telephone
battle, over that single “tapped” wire, which they still waged in
arousing public opinion. From the beginning education for justice and
not revolutionary agitation had been their work. And under Alfred
Lewis’s leadership any group that wished to picket would have good
advice and sane control.
I went over to Socialist Headquarters to get advice with the rest.
A group of girls called to me eagerly, “Are you going out with us?”
I answered, “I don’t know: I’m going to do what Alfred Lewis tells me
to do.”
There he sat, young still although his hair is turning gray, clear-cut
of feature, with the look of a boy who has just had a cool, long swim
and would like to have it all over again.
He studied me and said, “That’s a Communist crowd going out to picket.
I’m not going myself and I wouldn’t ask you to do what I myself am not
going to do. Wait! We may be needed more later.”
That settled it, and I went back to Defense Headquarters where I might
be of some use. But the crowd went out. Forty-four men and women were
arrested. One courageous little woman, Dorothy Parker, was roughly
handled by officers who bruised her neck and arms, marching her in the
middle of the street up three cobblestone blocks.
The mob which had been watching the picketers, undisturbed and
unarrested for “loitering,” backed off in front of Mrs. Parker,
shouting, “Hang her! Hang them all! Hang the anarchists!”
Later, after she had been bailed, I saw her crying, not because she had
been so badly bruised but because she could not forget that cry of the
mob, “Hang her!” She was not an anarchist; she was not a Communist; she
was not, so far as I knew, even that constitutional radical known as
Socialist. She was, like Mr. Teeple, just one more American doing her
duty for justice’s sake.
Still the afternoon “wore” on. Once Mary Donovan went into the outer
office to send away a noisily excited group.
“Think,” she said on her return, “of their daring to come here on a day
like this to enjoy themselves!”
Rosa Sacco said nothing. She seemed to drift further and further away
from those unfailing friends of hers as she waited to know whether
a respite would be granted and she might see her husband many times
again, or whether she must see him for the last time. The cough was
drier, a few more pieces of paper were crumpled, but she neither sighed
nor spoke nor wept.
The Governor’s Council was to meet at noon. Surely by three or half
past there would be some word. But, we heard, the Council did not
meet and there was no word. It was half past five before the Governor
entered his office and the Council did meet. Then they adjourned for
dinner and it was half past eight before they were in session again,
Attorney Arthur D. Hill with them to make one more last plea for the
Defense.
But the little woman who waited, and Mary Donovan her friend, and these
good men? They adjourned for no food,--they had eaten nothing all day.
Saying I would return, I went out, passing the handsome blue coats, and
turning the corner to an Italian fruit stand. There I bought big rosy
cling-stone peaches, plums and pears golden from sunlight and from
air. And back I went, past the handsome blue coats once more, these
“bombs”--many of them!--in three bags. And at the sight of food that is
more beautiful than any other, as fruit is, eyes brightened.
I coaxed Mrs. Sacco. Rubbing off the fuzz carefully, she ate a peach.
Then Mr. Felicani’s hand reached into one of the bags and he, too,
rubbed the fuzz from a peach and ate it gratefully.
“Oh, I’m so glad when they eat!” exclaimed Mary Donovan. “I cannot make
them take any food at all!”
Of herself she neither spoke nor thought. And she took no fruit. It was
plain that even her endowment of strength could not stand the strain
much longer. And as for her career as a State Factory Inspector that
was over, for the State had dismissed her the day the Court’s decision
had been made known.
And already she was in bondage of a sort. For there are two economic
and social prisons: the first in which men are shut out from the
opportunity to earn their livings; the second in which they are shut
in, away from those who do earn their living under conditions which
are in general termed “free.” The forces behind the first order of
imprisonment are found in the _mores_ of an age. And those who have
watched those forces at work on others or upon themselves, know how
brutally efficient they can be. Imprisonment of the second order Mary
Donovan was to face later on the two charges made by the Boston police.
But the first she was soon to experience in all its bitterness not of
confinement but of exclusion. Towards the close of August she was to
begin spending days, weeks, months, looking for work in Boston and New
York and to find that all doors, even those she might have expected
to be open, were closed to her. Several friends were to do what they
could to break through this social “police” cordon. By and large their
efforts were futile. And Mary Donovan was to pay in full the charge in
this country to-day against a struggle for conscience’ sake in the loss
of the well-paid post of State Factory Inspector in Massachusetts. In
New York in December, after more than a half a year of unemployment,
she found a chance to wash dishes in Schrafft’s!
Off and on throughout that interminable afternoon and early evening, a
man’s hand would reach into a bag and take plum or pear or peach. And
from time to time in one way or another during the late afternoon the
tension was relaxed.
Gardner Jackson, jesting with Felicani, said he could not answer a
certain telephone call, “For I can’t speak Italian,--not yet!”
Or Mrs. Sacco, persuaded into something like listening to bird and dog
stories, told about her little daughter’s pet kitten.
“Sometimes,” added Mrs. Sacco, with a smile that was a gleam from a
storm-tossed sea-gull’s wing, “when I am not nervous, I like to pet it,
too.”
Or the quiet entrance of Professor Felix Frankfurter, compact, human,
friend of justice and of these breaking hearts. Or the coming and going
of Joseph Moro, and Creighton Hill, friend of the Committee, alert,
attentive to a thousand details.... And there was John Barry, sometime
chairman of the Committee, but whether active as chairman or not, there
one night every week with a regularity which never failed.
Out in Charlestown they were getting ready. The official executioner
for three states, among them Massachusetts, had arrived. That death’s
head of his, that mouth with its twisted fixed smile, how did he fare
as he looked forward to the night’s work? He was not to be at the
banquet after the Death House scene, to which official guests at the
execution had been invited, for he was to return to New York on a dawn
train. How would dawn feel to him? And the arms of his wife and the
kiss of his little child?
To the _Brooklyn Eagle_ reporter who had been with us, word had been
sent by Warden Hendry that if he wanted to cover the night he would
better come on out to Charlestown. But still no official word had been
received at Headquarters, and now the evening was “wearing” on.
Then Rosa Sacco fainted as quietly as she had spent the day. A nurse
was called who, with Mary Donovan, took Mrs. Sacco, half-conscious, in
a taxi to a friend’s house, honest, fearless Lilian Haley’s. And now
the night “wore on,” and stories of respite or execution were given out
and “killed” and given out and “killed.”
Mary Donovan returned.
“What,” she said, with her finger pointing upward, “if the finger of
God should stay this execution to-night!”
Gardner Jackson went to the State House, asking to see the Governor.
And the Governor’s Secretary inquiring whether Mr. Jackson had come
to see the Governor “for humane or legal reasons,” Jackson replied,
“Humane. What else is left!” And he was asked to leave the State House.
Here was a man who was no politician, sacrificing openly, as Mr.
Jackson was doing, any possible future in the state. Now he was back.
It was eleven and the midnight hour was on its way. Still no message!
Several calls came from “the friend’s house” saying that Rosa Sacco
wanted Mary Donovan, and still they waited, hoping and despairing.
Word was sent from Defense Headquarters that Mrs. Sacco must be got
ready for the worst. The strength of Mary Donovan was beginning to
show a break here and a break there. She not only thought of the
torture to those innocent men and women, but, like the levee holding
back the river, occasionally a torrent of spoken anger swirled through.
Several times she promised to go to the friend’s house but always she
waited for another telephone call, and still no message came. Finally
she took up the telephone, calling Mr. Thompson to ask what steps
should be taken to claim the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti. Her voice
broke and she sobbed.
Strange, I thought, that she should still believe in the kindness of
the law! Was not this belief in its ultimate kindness but one more
evidence of her own generous heart?
The offices were filling up. Nobody knew what to do. Nobody knew
what to think. Messages came, messages were sent, there was nothing
authoritative. It was five minutes before twelve. And the sensitive
face of Felicani was ghastly. And then came word that could be trusted.
It was not sent by the Governor or any one connected with him: +A
RESPITE OF TWELVE DAYS HAD BEEN GRANTED TO NICOLA SACCO AND BARTOLOMEO
VANZETTI+.
The crowded office became more still. A member of the Committee picked
up the telephone and sent the message to the “friend’s house” that,
without a moment’s delay, Rosa Sacco might know.
No voices were raised. There was no excited speaking. Gradually those
friends who were unofficial faded away. The Committee could be seen
gathering itself together to battle on for justice for these two
Italian workers who had dared to hope for the day when the workers
would themselves end war and poverty.
To one another they kept repeating, “We have until the twenty-second.
Well, that is something.”
As she left the office Mary Donovan turned to me and said, “I’m going
to Rosa. Mr. Felicani is coming later. You come with him!”
And she was gone.
Before we could leave there were odds and ends of business needing
attention. Then I found myself out on Hanover Street, walking with Mr.
Felicani up cool, moonlit, deserted city streets towards Beacon Hill.
We were on our way towards Boston Common where once Emerson had
pastured his cow, and then up onto Beacon Hill of which Margaret
Fuller Ossoli after her Italian marriage had dreamed in Italy. Where
was that “kernel of nobleness” of which Margaret Fuller wrote? Was it
within the State House which we were passing, or within the minds and
hearts of these men and women who believed that a living law has in it,
like life, elements of growth and progress; that commerce is creative
only when it benefits the community as a whole as well as individual
wealth; and that that education alone is really humane which is
democratic and without fear?
Were not these men and women fighting for--not against--law and order?
Was not justice the issue? And was not injustice the fuse which touched
off every revolution there ever was or ever will be? What revolt, what
destruction of law and order, could there be if there were no injustice
in commerce, in education, in government?
Down a hill, then up a hill to Lilian Haley’s, the friend’s house where
Rosa Sacco was. We were talking now of the education of public opinion
and of the safety and the hope which lies in education and education
alone. With that strange, unbendable, almost fierce, independence
which those who are strong in their gentleness sometimes possess, it
was plain that in Aldino Felicani was one who would never yield, never
compromise, until all that a dedicated life could do had been done to
secure justice, present or retroactive.
Just before we entered the friend’s house, Aldino Felicani was speaking
of what the Defense Committee had to do in the days that now remained.
Of Sacco and Vanzetti he added wistfully, “Ah, these are the very best
men I must ever hope to know!”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From “America Arraigned,” an Anthology of Sacco-Vanzetti poems
edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING
“You cannot kill the dream of those who find
A faith that shall restore the world to men.”
+Lucia Trent.+[2]
Past flashed the crowned roads of Vermont, then New Hampshire and
finally Massachusetts: ponds, lakes, mountains, little villages,
larch and hemlock, spruce and birch, fireweed, and mullein in bloom,
goldenrod and button bush, brook and bridge, and the old, old
farmhouses of a day gone by,--all the beauty and comfort and wealth
that lie between the Adirondack region where John Brown is buried yet
still lives, into the outskirts of Boston where some seventy-five years
ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived and wrote those famous essays which
still form part of the reading of all thoughtful men and women.
The land of “promise” for so many over so many scores of years! Beside
the road into an old Vermont farmhouse with a lean-to roof stood a
woman, shawl about her shoulders, gazing off into the trees and up to
the hills. How many generations had it been since for her people, too,
America had been the land of “promise”? The drape of shawl and angle of
the unmistakable New England back said that it had been a long, long
time.
Then we were pulling into a “marble” city where a young married couple
took the chairs opposite mine. As the wife was seating herself she saw
a package which had been dropped hastily into her chair by the porter
as he went forward.
“What’s that,--a bomb?” said the wife, looking at it with suspicion.
“Yes,” answered her husband, facetiously, “a Sacco-Vanzetti bomb.”
Derided, and so reassured, the wife sat down and the husband opened his
Sunday paper.
“Justice Holmes won’t act,” said the husband.
“What’ll they do now?” asked the wife.
“Get somebody else,” answered the husband, a young Uncle Sam, lean and
muscular and plain.
Comfort everywhere and abundance! Then the smell of the sea at night,
somehow curiously discordant with its suggestion of vast fresh spaces
of dark water and sky as we drew into the electric-lighted yet dingy
north end of Boston. I was on my way back to be with the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee as the night of respite or death approached.
“There is Judge Brandeis,” ran my thought as I walked swiftly down the
North Station platform; “he is really the hope.”
Stepping through the door to take a taxi over to Hanover Street, in
that semi-circle of electric lights, men were shouting and waving
a small pink “extra” at the top of which stood two words in big
headlines: “BRANDEIS WON’T--”
After that nothing was “visible” except the panorama of thought that
passed, a vague sense of going through the “gray” of Scollay Square,
and the knowledge that the taxi had turned around at the end of one
of the cross streets and that we were in front of “256” and the steep
stairs, two flights up, to the offices.
Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan were not there. But Joseph Moro
was,--always there, always busy.
It was his voice asking, “Have you met Miss Vanzetti?”
The memory of another voice was in my ears, that of a woman of letters
who has worked and lived in Italy more or less for thirty years and
whose books on Italy are familiar friends to many who love that land.
Again that literary friend was saying, “I understand that the Signorina
Vanzetti has behaved herself like a heroine and a lady from beginning
to end of her stay in Boston.”
But the “end” was not yet. Beside Miss Vanzetti sat Rosa Sacco. From
the glow on those sensitive faces it looked even as if a happier end
might be in sight. And then it occurred to me that both had just come
from the Scenic Auditorium meeting where they had been given so kind
a greeting from the loyal thousand gathered there. Friendship in such
an hour casts no common light. Perhaps it was the reflection of that
welcome which was still upon their faces.
And the night passed, even as those winding, hill-cupped roads of
Vermont and New Hampshire had passed. Only the panorama of dreaming and
waking was not of pond and lake, of mountain, of village and of tree,
of flower, rock, bridge, and ancient house.
The panorama was of brave men and women who, in the seven years’
struggle they had made for justice for these two workers who had been
dreaming of and working for a world without war and poverty, had shown
the principle of selflessness; those two noble prisoners back in the
Death House again, already from their hands the touch and scent of
strong leather, the silvery coolness of fish and the smell of the sea
gone forever; the Defense Committee and its counsel, without hope,
fighting on to the end; the friends who for justice’s sake--doctors,
lawyers, merchants, pastors (but no priests)--rallied about them,
giving beyond their means, working beyond their strength; and these two
loving women before me who spoke precisely and with quiet.
And somehow in those passing human pictures were all the strength,
intention, beauty of life itself, crowning dream and waking with more
wonder than hill the valley,--that valley of the shadow of death,--a
symbol towards which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were on their
way.
Defeat? Yes, of a kind, there at the Bellevue Headquarters where the
Citizens’ National Committee, an eleventh hour organization, was
sponsored by men and women of acknowledged power, already a list of 505
names, many of which are known for public service throughout whatever
parts of the earth are still socially-minded: Jane Addams, Judge Amidon
of North Dakota, Mary Austin, Howard Brubaker, J. McKeen Cattell,
John S. Codman, John R. Commons, Waldo Cook, John Dewey, Dr. Haven
Emerson, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Walcott Farnam, Mrs. J. Malcolm Forbes,
Norman Hapgood, Arthur Garfield Hays, William Ernest Hocking, John
Howard Lawson, Mary E. McDowell, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Mussey, George
E. Roewer Jr., Graham Taylor, John T. Vance, Oswald Garrison Villard,
Marian Parker Whitney, Mary E. Woolley, and some five hundred other
names representing conspicuous achievement.[3]
Nevertheless it was a Committee which in the very process of
organizing suffered from disorganization, attacked from all sides
by the consciousness of the mythology of fear which the philosophy
and economics of a century had built up and a World War consummated.
Now as swiftly and inexorably as cancer strikes the human
body,--money-symbolism, greed, class-consciousness, class-hatred,
covering themselves with the garments of respectability, law, and
patriotism, had struck into the social body. A strong Committee,
despite its strength aware of its helplessness, consisting among others
of Dr. Alice Hamilton of Harvard, Paul Kellogg of the _Survey_, Amy
Woods, Waldo Cook of the _Springfield Republican_ and John F. Moors,
was formed to represent the Citizens’ National Committee. Mr. Moors
is a Harvard Overseer as well as a banker. It was he who persuaded
President Lowell to serve on the Advisory Committee. When the decision
of the Committee was brought in, he was willing to accept it but joined
the Citizens’ National Committee to ask for clemency only. At noon
this delegation called upon the Governor. The Governor’s Secretary Mr.
MacDonald, who had handled all the material submitted to the Governor
and dealt with all the witnesses, derailed the purpose of the Committee
by greeting Waldo Cook with the accusation that Mr. Cook had accepted
a bribe of $20,000 from the Defense Committee to write his Sacco and
Vanzetti editorials for the _Springfield Republican_.
And defeat at Defense Headquarters, too? Yes, of a sort--the kind whose
terms have in them ideas which find symbolic immortality equally upon
the Cross or in the Death House.
That noon Felix Frankfurter said in the dingy corridor of Defense
Headquarters, out of the hearing of Rosa Sacco, “She must not be made
conscious of the larger issues of this thing, for now how can she think
of anything but that it is her loved one who suffers! Yet somehow, no
matter what happens to-night, I am too healthy--or something--to give
up hope. I cannot believe it is the end.”
And the spent figure of Aldino Felicani, bending to Destiny but not
broken.
And the arrow-flight of Arthur Hill’s car rushing now southward towards
the sea to ask legal intervention from one, a judge of the Supreme
Court, who, showing neither hospitality nor the quality of mercy, that
early morning missed the great opportunity of his career. Then another
flight northward, desperate, the last chance, in an open boat upon the
sea, to an island whose shoreline is a rocky temple of beauty upon
which the Defense was to meet its last shipwreck.
The day was passing. With it the hours of the two who were to be
executed were spilling swiftly from one glass to another, from life
to death. A curious sense of whirling figures grew upon one and of
futility. It was not unlike dust in sunlight. In the offices telephones
rang incessantly, telegraph messengers came and went, men and women
moved swiftly to and fro, typewriters clicked.... And in those offices
at the Bellevue, as well as at the Defense Headquarters, national, as
well as international contacts by telegraph and cable were bravely
maintained to the last.
A few figures stood out as somehow expressive, in their very
difference, of this united struggle of conscience against injustice:
John Dos Passos flitting about, cheerful, charming; Mrs. Elliott
here, as in her work for peace, fearless, gentle, quiet; Paul Kellogg
frayed with years of battle for social welfare, pale, determined; Dr.
Alice Hamilton of Harvard, strong in reserve; Waldo Cook, cool-headed,
responsible, ready at any cost, but never by any means except by the
use of reason to maintain the editorial position of the _Springfield
Republican_. Mrs. Glendower Evans, in gray, white-haired, was seated,
a Quaker-like figure in the midst of the Woman’s City Club, waiting,
talking with the friends who came to her. Mrs. Evans’s faithful
friendship to Sacco and Vanzetti, and therefore to the issues of
justice, had proved itself in more than one way. Not only had she given
the case her financial support but also she had assembled evidence
with, as a friend wrote of her, “an insight as to its value in court
which was worthy of a mind long-trained by court practice.” Best of
all was the gift of herself, so complete that she was troubled not to
have been able to share even imprisonment.
And there was Powers Hapgood testing the free assemblage and free
speech issue again and yet again, thinking, as Paul Kellogg wrote of
him in the _Survey_, “If, when the lives of two men were at stake and
thousands of working people believed they weren’t getting justice at
the hands of the courts, you couldn’t even get a permit to discuss
the issue on Boston Common, then it looked as if we had let our old
liberties be scrapped for us and political action didn’t offer a way
out. And they would be scrapped, if we didn’t exercise our rights and
show that men believed in them.”
Assuredly in those thirteen days in Boston from the tenth of August
to the twenty-second, when the issue of justice hung in the balance,
with those in power there was no spirit of making good a mistake
either by experience or by free discussion. Boston Regnant through
Chief of Police Crowley denied all requests for use of the Common.
And even upon that night of the twenty-second Crowley was to refuse
Miss Hale’s request for the use of Bunker Hill Monument as a place for
free assemblage, “where the people might repeat the Lord’s Prayer or
sing hymns.” It is not improbable that many sorts and conditions of
Americans who, for conscience’ sake, assembled in Boston during those
days, wondered in what traditions of free speech and free assemblage
the police representation of those in power had been trained. It is
certain that the social and political education of those who controlled
the police had included the name of John Stuart Mill and possibly even
a certain paragraph from that most famous of his essays +ON LIBERTY+:
“+BUT THE PECULIAR EVIL OF SILENCING THE EXPRESSION OF AN OPINION IS,
THAT IT IS ROBBING THE HUMAN RACE; POSTERITY AS WELL AS THE EXISTING
GENERATION; THOSE WHO DISSENT FROM THE OPINION, STILL MORE THAN
THOSE WHO HOLD IT. IF THE OPINION IS RIGHT, THEY ARE DEPRIVED OF THE
OPPORTUNITY OF EXCHANGING ERROR FOR TRUTH; IF WRONG, THEY LOSE, WHAT
IS ALMOST AS GREAT A BENEFIT, THE CLEARER PERCEPTION AND LIVELIER
IMPRESSION OF TRUTH, PRODUCED BY ITS COLLISION WITH ERROR.... WE CAN
NEVER BE SURE THAT THE OPINION WE ARE ENDEAVORING TO STIFLE IS A FALSE
OPINION; AND IF WE WERE SURE, STIFLING IT WOULD BE AN EVIL STILL.+”
Throughout the day it seemed clearer and clearer, where much was
confused, that already as individuals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti were being lost sight of, that already they were gone from
our midst--though they had still a few hours to live--and had become
symbolic of issues more important than the life of any human being can
ever be.
And then another figure in the midst of many: Alfred Baker Lewis,
himself just out of the police station, coming swiftly through the
hotel lobby.
Catching sight of me, he called, “A lot of them have been arrested and
we haven’t any money left to bail them. Have you any?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I’ll take over what I have and get more. Where
shall I go?”
“They’re in the Joy Street Police Station. Mary Donovan’s there.” And
he was gone.
So was I in a quick shift from the Bellevue to the lock-up and the
greeting with Mary Donovan standing by her “people” in and out of jail.
In the flight to and fro in which, through Amy Woods, John Dos
Passos, Mrs. Glendower Evans, Arthur Garfield Hays, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and some other generous friends, more than enough money was
collected to bail out a group of over one hundred and fifty men and
women, certain fragments of pictures stood out: a young man, stunted
in growth, with pure childlike face, being hustled down Joy Street
between two officers twice his size;[4] Professor Ellen Hayes of
Wellesley being taken to the patrol wagon on the arm of a young
Irish bluecoat--untroubled, serene, “a grand soul” as Mary Donovan
said of her later that day; some groups of garment workers cheering
their comrades at the risk of being themselves arrested; Edna St.
Vincent Millay seated in the bail room, her grave, dark husband,
Eugene Boissevin, standing beside her; Clarina Michelson, with energy
undiminished by the Passaic strike, cheerful, kindly, being bailed;
Lola Ridge coming out of the inner guard room, her face solemn in the
solemn hours that were passing.
Nevertheless that jail will remain in my memory as the only gay place
which I saw in those thirteen days.
From one nice-looking group being herded in, a voice called blithely,
“Here come some more of these jail birds!”
They looked it, America’s youth, best and bravest! And within that
station were being deposited the many placards which many had been
carrying, among them one which had in it the meaning of all the
others,--Paula Halliday’s SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI! IS JUSTICE DEAD?
Here were none of those who, to quote a line from Laura Simmons’s
sonnet, kept their “prudent way within the crowd.” While I waited in
the bailing room where, in addition to the bail asked, the bailer
collected two dollars for each arrest--his way of earning a living!--a
man, pointing to a suit case, asked me to sit down. It was kindness,
and in such a place well to cultivate kindness.
For awhile all the windows were shut tight. Within a space adequate
for two score there were packed over several hours almost seven times
that number. The windows were closed, for some fifty garment workers
were chanting the Internationale, their triumphant, militant song of
brotherhood.
From the guard room Clarina Michelson, Helen Todd, Lola Ridge, and
others were being let out. Mary Donovan seemed anxious about some who
should be bailed at once, among them Powers Hapgood. She turned to look
for him, but, strangely, he was gone. And with him the day was going,
too.
The last night had come. At Defense Headquarters, Louis Bernheimer was
sending and receiving messages. He was as suddenly and mysteriously
present on this night as he had been independently and mysteriously
active in behalf of the Defense Committee, for unknown to the
Committee, Mr. Bernheimer had written and circulated 30,000 pamphlets
to ministers throughout the country. A graduate of Yale in 1917, an
air pilot in France during the war, a student of Chinese philosophy, a
hermit, he had already been a source of influence to the Committee.
Powerful, cynically courageous, he betrayed his emotion by no conscious
sign. Unconsciously, however, he revealed the strain under which he
worked, for every once in a while he whispered to himself.
The wire Louis Bernheimer handled kept efficient touch with all who
belonged in that office and yet were not there. Inside the office
the editor of an Italian paper, Serafino Romualdi, was taking notes,
now asking how to spell “monument,” then checking against some other
unfamiliar word.
Via the telephone the office knew that Mary Donovan, a lawyer with her,
had hurried out to the psychiatric hospital to which the state police
had been taking Powers Hapgood even as she had turned to find him
somehow mysteriously vanished.
The office knew, too, that Gardner Jackson and his sister, Dr. Edith
Jackson, were on their way with Mrs. Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti to
the State House to make one last appeal to a cast-iron executive; and
that Michael Angelo Musmanno and Aldino Felicani were on their way
back from their farewell in the Death House, Mr. Musmanno to act as
interpreter for Vanzetti’s sister, Aldino Felicani to return to the
Defense office.
What was there for two women to do, for Ruth Hale and for me? An
age-old prerogative of women: feed hungry men. Others would be coming
in, and they, too, whether they knew it or not would need food. And no
food except a bag of peanuts was on that table banked with telegrams,
letters and carbons. We went out after coffee and sandwiches and milk.
Waiting, we, too, had coffee on the clean table by the cool window of
that little Italian restaurant one flight up. We read there words from
a letter which had come from a young editor: “It seems so inextricably
intertwined with the most inert and selfish of human motives, the
desire to be comfortable, not to be bothered, to maintain the _status
quo_, to keep things as they’ve always been, to defend institutions
from attack, to get rid of men of that type. Reason is no longer in
evidence. And I have yielded momentarily, more than once to the weak
wish that it was all over and filed away neatly.”
Quickly now--after seven years of delay--one sort of “filing” would
soon be done and over. And then that letter which had come straight
out of the heart of youth leapt into flame: “One is removed from life
and death, from all emotion, and suspended in a desperate abyss, where
calmness and self-control are the things most needed. Events happen,
and are seen in crystalline stillness. But the mind, the soul, continue
the hopeless struggle, for all is not lost, as long as the desire for
justice persists.”
For all is not lost as long as the desire for justice persists! Around
the corner from Headquarters over in Salem Street in the rooms of
the Hod Carriers’ Union, the “desire” was most certainly persisting.
Mother Bloor had come all the way from California to speak for justice
for Sacco and Vanzetti. Lola Ridge and John Howard Lawson had passed
through Headquarters and had gone over to Salem Street to speak for
justice.
As we sat on, quiet in the tense office, messages coming and going,
now and then a cup of coffee being poured or a sandwich eaten, in my
thoughts were lines from Lola Ridge’s “Two in the Death House” which,
repeated to me the week before, she was now chanting over in Salem
Street.
“You have endured those moments, you
Close to the rough nap of earth, and knowing her perennial ways.
And when, on some one of your counted mornings, light
That pulls at the caught root of things
Has pierced you with a touch, or leavened air,
* * * * *
You too have hoped--with the ardor of young shoots, renascent under
concrete,
And with them have gone down to defeat again.”[5]
Dos Passos, flitting into the office, called: “It’s more cheerful over
there! Come on over!”
Then suddenly, when Miss Hale and I were already halfway down the
stairs, from the street came uproar, and the rush of many feet and the
sound of hundreds of voices.
Mother Bloor had been arrested for speaking out the window of the Hod
Carriers’ Union to some five hundred people who had been unable to get
inside.
When the police were heard coming up the stairs of the Hod Carriers’
Union to get her, Fred Beale, a splendid type of young man, threw his
arm about Mother Bloor to protect her, saying, “You mustn’t let them
get you!”
Brave as always, she disengaged his arm, and said, “You’ll have to let
me go with them, Fred!”
And quietly she went away with the police, and from Hanover Street had
come the angry shout, “Mother Bloor’s been arrested!”
Putting my hand on Ruth Hale’s arm, I held her where she was. She had
done her best to get Crowley to give a permit for the use of Bunker
Hill Monument for all who would meet together and speak. And she had
failed. Now was not the time for any one to “strike” again.
Dos Passos had disappeared, and we went back up through the outer
office and on into the office where messages came and went and there
was more silence than speech.
The outer office filled up and emptied intermittently, rich and
poor alike coming and going. From a brave mission to plead with the
Governor, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and a friend were there, like the
brave gentlewomen they are, standing fraternally in the outer office.
From that outer office, too, came the sound of a woman’s voice,
curiously deep, speaking with a slight accent: “They wanted us to
come over and now they don’t want us. We have worked hard and made
sacrifices. They want all the power. We want some power, too, and we
are going to have it. During the war, thinking my name was German, the
dirty dogs framed me. And then they found I wasn’t German and had to
let me go. They think they hold a first mortgage on us, do they? But
they--”
Who were “they”? Was that the government, political wealth, or what was
it? Were those the terms in which our foreign born now thought of this
land of promise?
Mother Bloor, quickly bailed by Mary Donovan and quickly back, was
seated in the outer office.
But a small group from the Hod Carriers’ Union was making its way out
to Charlestown Prison. There, now, Sacco and Vanzetti were momently
expecting the summons to that chair visible from their adjoining cells,
with its
“---- cap that pours into the brain
The livid needles of its pain.”[6]
At eleven o’clock the group led by Lola Ridge having received neither
orders nor suggestions from Defense Headquarters, they had started, a
straggling half hundred, for Charlestown.
In sight of the roofs of the Jail, Lola Ridge had found herself in the
lead, holding by the hand a small school-girl who had accompanied them
from the start.
Jail in sight the school-girl had said, “Here is where I say good-by to
you!”
With a young Scotchman and another girl, Lola Ridge slipped under the
ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the
Prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her.
As he reined in his horse fairly over her, she heard him whispering in
a frightened voice, “What do you want?”
Daring the trooper to ride her down, she refused to leave the rope.
Suddenly there was the uproar of conflict. A group of men from the
straggling fifty she had led, had thrown themselves between her and the
police now closing in upon her.
A friend, Carline Murphy, knowing, as the men did, that an order had
been given for Lola Ridge’s arrest, slipped in beside her.
While the conflict between the men and the police continued, Carline
Murphy drew her away, saying, “Lola, come! I know a way to get near the
Jail.”
This she did to save her, and, still asserting that she knew a way to
get near the Jail, they were lost in the crowd.
Mary Donovan, too, was back again in the inner office. She and the
lawyer had seen Powers Hapgood. Now she was urged to drink a cup of
coffee and eat a sandwich.
As she bit into the large sandwich, humor flashed over the pale face.
“This is what I call strong bread!” she exclaimed.
And while she ate, she was giving an account of Powers Hapgood.
Before they were allowed to see him, they had been kept waiting two
hours because the Superintendent said he had “to have his little
tea.” Admitted, they had found Hapgood in bed and eager to tell his
experiences.
When the attendants had asked him why he was there, Powers Hapgood had
replied, “For trying to help save Sacco and Vanzetti.”
Then the attendants had called these Italians “wops” and had told Mr.
Hapgood he was in the very bed in which Sacco had been.
An attendant said supper was ready.
Would he like some?
What was it?
Beef stew.
And Powers Hapgood had said, “No, I don’t want beef stew. I’m a
vegetarian.”
“And after that,” said Mary Donovan, humor bubbling up again, “they
were sure he was psychopathic.”
The attendants, who seemed to be a “gentle lot,” had then given Mr.
Hapgood an eggnog and some bread and butter.
Gardner Jackson and Dr. Edith Jackson came in. Gardner Jackson sat down
by the telephone. There was silence. They had come from the Governor’s
office, on their return leaving Rosa Sacco and Signorina Vanzetti at
Lilian Haley’s.
Dr. Edith Jackson, her head between her hands, spoke in a trembling
voice, “Twice the Governor said, waving his hand toward Rosa Sacco and
Signorina Vanzetti, ‘It is these ladies that move me most.’”
And some in that office wondered, “Was it?”
Heard, too, over the Governor’s telephone during that hour was the
ringing voice of Attorney Thompson who believed, and still believes in
the innocence of these two men.
In the Secretary’s office, where he stayed while the others went in to
the Governor with Michael Angelo Musmanno to act as interpreter,--in
the Secretary’s office, Gardner Jackson was offered a cigar!
Mary Donovan spoke less and less, answering an occasional inquiry which
came from the “friend’s house” where again Rosa Sacco was waiting for
the end, but this time not only with faithful, fearless Lilian Haley
beside her but also Signorina Vanzetti.
And again at Headquarters all were waiting, with hope, without hope....
On that night of August twenty-second, haunting phrases, aspects of
courage that did not flinch, many invisible presences in remembered
word and look and act were with those who assembled in Defense
Headquarters and wherever a group was gathered together in the name of
Sacco and Vanzetti.
At the telephone the voice of Gardner Jackson, as the minutes passed
became more and more quiet: “Was the execution to go forward?”
“No news?”
“Bad!”
“No, nothing,--nothing at all!”
So the brief inquiries and monosyllabic answers followed one another.
Beyond the doors of Defense Headquarters events went forward that will
never be recorded, and all expressive of sympathy for this tragedy
reaching its visible climax.
One experience was that of Helen Peabody, the artist, who also had made
her way out to the Jail, got detached from her group, and had been
arrested. She was taken into Charlestown Prison where in the guard room
a courteous police officer had offered her a chair.
Suddenly she realized that she was within the very walls that held
Sacco and Vanzetti,--there where they were about to die. In her thought
saluting them, Helen Peabody continued to stand. Placing her hand upon
the walls that held Sacco and Vanzetti, she stood at attention in that
jail guard room till after midnight.
As midnight approached at Defense Headquarters, even when there was
speech there was yet stillness in those offices.
During that hour before midnight Debs was spoken of,--the fact that
the last money order he had been able to make out had been for this
Committee.
And some one in the office said, “All day thoughts have been repeating
a prayer taught when we were children, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’
They have nothing to regret. They are good children. They will sleep
well.”
Aldino Felicani, sitting with bent head, answered gently, “What are two
lives! It is the ideal.”
It was midnight. Quiet and more quiet, Gardner Jackson was speaking at
the telephone.
Madeiros was gone.
Once a thief had hung on either side, the Christ between. Now, two
idealists, not one, as if symbol of an achieved fellowship for which
Christ had lived and died, and but one thief. These two, atheists
though they might be, of the Brotherhood of Christ.
And perhaps in the moment when from Nicola Sacco they were cutting
off speech with the straps guards were fixing about his head and the
Death House heard him calling out those last words: “Long live anarchy!
Farewell my wife and child and all my friends!... Farewell, Mother!”
came a cry from Mary Donovan, “I can’t--I can’t believe it!”
Her brother and a friend were swiftly at her side, there was the snap
of an ammonia capsule, and control quickly regained. Still that belief
in the ultimate kindness of the law.
Vanzetti next,--gentleman of a gentle land, shaking hands with his
guards, thanking Warden Hendry for his kindness, and, even as they
blindfolded him, from this atheist those Christlike words: “I wish to
forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
In the ears of those who stood in that Death House must have rung down
two thousand years of time the words of Another, “Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do!”
Through the inner door of Defense Headquarters tumbled the Italian
editor. Unable to speak, the breath in him shaking the whole man, he
bit at a roll of papers he held in his hand.
Then, crying out convulsively, “They are gone!” he threw himself head
and shoulders, sobbing, upon the table.
And in that moment there was no separation between manhood and tears.
They were one and alike beautiful.
Most courteous and most sensitive brother of ours, you meet a double
tragedy. _From what_ did you come? _To what_ have you come? Fleeing
Fascism in your lovely land, what is it you have gained here in this
country of which Sacco wrote as “always in my dreams”?[7] Is it
freedom? Is it the ideal? What was it that--the ideal--you hoped of
your land of promise?
From the outer office, some weeping, all quietly, they were going down
the steep stairs.
In the inner office Mary Donovan spoke, “Come, let us not answer the
telephone any more.”
And we went out, in groups or alone, down the stairs, and into the
night.
Those thirteen days from August tenth to August twenty-second were over.
Then, after hours that seemed eternity, the way back to the foothills
of the Adirondacks where John Brown lies buried. Land of promise,
beauty and wealth everywhere! Hills and rushing streams of the
Berkshires in the summer sunlight, the deep valley of the Hudson in
the heat of afternoon, in the dusk the thin ribbon of water and first
cliffs of Lake Champlain.
In my thoughts were another beautiful land and another Brotherhood
struggling for justice, Padraic Pearse and his poem “+TO DEATH+”:
Of wealth or of glory
I shall leave nothing behind me
(I think it, O God, enough!)
But my name in the heart of a child.
The train came to an unexpected stop outside a little fortress town,
among the first of those historic towns on Lake Champlain.
Above the sudden quiet, I heard a high-pitched woman’s voice, “That
Italian case that was on at Boston.”
“When?” asked another woman who sat beside her.
“To-night. But I didn’t get tuned in in time and--”
With a jerk, through the dark, the train went on.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
[3] _V._ Appendix C., pp. 108-120, for the 505 names of the initial list
taken by Paul U. Kellogg, editor of the _Survey_.
[4] The author of “Thirteen Days” has thought many times of the
unfairness and omissions inevitable in any attempt to make adequate or
accurate records during such days of confusion. Although he will be
found among those who stand up and are counted again and yet again, the
author does not know the name of the stunted boy with the beautiful
face. Another illustration of the incompleteness of such a record as
this--if such illustration is needed!--is the fact that several men and
women who during those last years were of supreme comfort to the doomed
men were those who because of age or illness or distance were not
present at the end. For example, Alice Stone Blackwell to whom Vanzetti
wrote a very large number of letters.
[5] To be found entire in “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent
and Ralph Cheyney.
[6] From a poem by E. Merrill Root in “America Arraigned,” edited by
Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
[7] “The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,” edited by Marion Denman
Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, p. 10.... Students of these issues
should read, too, the valuable appendices to “The Letters.”
CHAPTER III
THE MARCH OF SORROW
“Pass not too near these outcast sons of men
Where walked the Christ ahead! lest you, too, share
The rabble’s wrath! in time take heed! beware
The shame--the bitter woe of Him again!
Your flaming zeal speak not so rash--so loud!
Pass on your prudent path within the crowd.”
From “The Way,” by +Laura Simmons+.[8]
“And within the offices of the Defense Committee that day, how was it?”
“It was businesslike,--very unpleasant,” answered Rose Pesotta.
“You mean?”
“I mean that little was said, and yet all seemed to be saying, ‘We must
bury our dead!’ They could think of nothing else.”
* * * * *
Between the midnight of their execution and the Sunday of the March of
Sorrow, throughout the world protest and violence had been expressing
themselves in one way and another,--portents for all who had eyes to
see and ears to hear.
In Cheswick, Pennsylvania, on the 22nd, state troopers had ridden into
a peacefully conducted protest meeting of some fifteen hundred striking
miners and their wives and children, and two hundred had been injured.
They were in an orchard, picnicking in groups, when it all happened.
A trooper who had swung his club once too often upon the heads of
women and children had been killed. The newspapers told about that.
The news did not tell about the woman, mother of four children, who
was so beaten up that she bled to death. The news did not tell about
old women who were assaulted, or about the young women and children
about whom Don Brown told, through the medium of the _New Republic_,
women and children beaten, thrown across rooms, gassed and ridden down.
Did Pittsburgh know? What would William Penn have thought about his
namesake state if he could have been present at the bloody dispersement
of this orderly, peaceful protest meeting in behalf of Sacco and
Vanzetti?... In Colorado in the coal fields matters did not fare any
better.
In London, on August 23d, forty persons were injured near the Marble
Arch where mounted and foot police charged Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers.
The crime of these sympathizers was that they tried to march. In Paris
on the same date street benches were torn up and newsstands were
overturned to be used as barricades by a mob of some fifteen thousand
sympathizers. In the conflict hundreds of civilians were injured, and
scores of police.
There were demonstrations throughout the civilized world as well as in
London and Paris. In Rosario, Argentine, throngs waiting in silence,
in silence bared their heads when just after midnight the news of the
executions reached them. At Buenos Aires a sympathetic strike and
the boycotting of American manufactures and products was organized.
At Sydney, Australia, a huge procession protested the executions and
resolutions were passed by the workers to boycott American goods. At
Johannesburg, South Africa,--Olive Schreiner’s country,--an American
flag was burned on the steps of the Town Hall and speeches were made
urging the boycotting of American goods. In both Berlin and Leipzig
there were serious clashes between rioting protestants and the police.
In Oporto, Portugal, many people were hurt when police dispersed a
demonstration being held in front of the American Consulate.
But at Headquarters, little was said, and yet, as Rose Pesotta
expressed it, all were saying, “We must bury our dead.” Stillness,
fog-like, blanketed both grief and work, and was broken only by the
buzz of telephone, or the question or answer of some quiet voice....
The authorities had nailed a two by four plank upright in the entrance
of Defense Headquarters, so that no coffins could be carried through
and up the stairway. It had been the plan of the Defense that loving
hands should bear the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti up the stairs in
order that they might lie in state in those rooms where the battle
for their lives had been fought. The Rotenberg Estate, which owns 256
Hanover Street, had complained to the police. In death as in life the
Committee met defeat, and the bodies had to be taken from Charlestown
Prison to Langone’s Funeral Chapel.
In many places outside that Funeral Chapel might have been heard the
harsh echoes of cheap denunciation of those who now lay still. But
the sound that was in the ears of the men and women in the Defense
Committee and in other committees that had struggled to save them, were
the “Hail and Farewell” of Sacco and Vanzetti to the Defense written in
the Death House on August 21:
+“THAT WE LOST AND HAVE TO DIE, DOES NOT DIMINISH OUR APPRECIATION
AND GRATITUDE FOR YOUR GREAT SOLIDARITY WITH US AND OUR FAMILIES.
FRIENDS AND COMRADES, NOW THAT THE TRAGEDY OF THIS TRIAL IS AT AN
END, BE ALL AS OF ONE HEART. ONLY TWO OF US WILL DIE. OUR IDEAL,
YOU OUR COMRADES, WILL LIVE BY MILLIONS. WE HAVE WON. WE ARE NOT
VANQUISHED. JUST TREASURE OUR SUFFERING, OUR SORROW, OUR MISTAKES,
OUR DEFEATS, OUR PASSION FOR FUTURE BATTLES AND FOR THE GREAT
EMANCIPATION.+
+“BE ALL AS OF ONE HEART IN THIS BLACKEST HOUR OF OUR TRAGEDY, AND WE
HAVE HEART. SALUTE FOR US ALL THE FRIENDS AND COMRADES OF THE EARTH.+
+“WE EMBRACE YOU ALL AND BID YOU OUR EXTREME GOOD-BY WITH OUR HEARTS
FILLED WITH LOVE AND AFFECTION.+
+“NOW AND EVER, LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL, LONG LIFE TO LIBERTY.+
+“YOURS FOR LIFE AND DEATH.+
+Nicola Sacco+
+Bartolomeo Vanzetti+.”[9]
And as at Defense Headquarters they were getting ready to bury their
dead, in the ears of millions of sympathizers the world over were
not only those words of +HAIL AND FAREWELL+, but also all the tender
courtesies that these two gentlemen of a gentle land had not forgot in
their final hours of agony. There was Vanzetti thanking his unfailing
friend, Mrs. Jessica Henderson, “most heartfully” for her care of his
sister, and admitting that at sight of his sister his heart had “lost
a little of its steadiness.” And Vanzetti writing a long and beautiful
letter to “Friend Dana,” the student of English Literature.[10] And
there was Sacco writing a last letter to his little son, Dante, of
which some of the sentences once read will always be remembered:
“What here I am going to tell you will touch your feelings, but
don’t cry, Dante, because many tears have been wasted, as your
mother’s have been wasted for seven years, and never did any good.
So, Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort
your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the
discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her
for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and
there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the
vivid stream and the gentle tranquillity of the mother nature, and I
am sure that she will enjoy this very much, as you surely would be
happy for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness,
don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one
step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help
the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends,
they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo
fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy and freedom for
all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more
love and you will be loved....”
Appreciation, guidance, love, courage for others, their thought in
these last hours,--messages that for centuries to come will teach men
how to live and how to die....
If, for their own comfort, on that last night of their life, they might
have seen their Defense Committee as some others saw it: the worn face
of Aldino Felicani; the persistence of Gardner Jackson; the ceaseless
watchfulness of Joseph Moro; the pallor of Mary Donovan; and, centered
in the midst of all their love and care, the quiet, patient beauty of
Rosa Sacco.
The Governor had assured a woman of wealth--also a woman of courage
and judgment--who had come to plead with him for stay of sentence,
that after it was over they would both sleep better in their beds. It
is probable that the only peace that night for multitudes of men and
women of all ranks and of national and international interests, was the
bitter gratitude that after the long agony, Sacco and Vanzetti knew the
peace of death. For they knew so well that all was not over, as the
authorities and the news said it was. They knew that it was only just
begun.
Two days later on the evening of August 25th some eight thousand people
were gathered before the doors of Langone’s waiting to go in to look
upon the faces of the Italian martyrs. Some had stood there all day
pressing up against the ropes that held them off. Very shortly after
those doors were opened, Mary Donovan, nerves at the breaking point
after the long years of Defense work and those thirteen days covering
the postponement and preparation for the executions, as some news and
camera men were about to take pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, took her
stand at the head of the coffins, in her hands a placard two and a half
feet long and two feet wide. On it were Judge Webster Thayer’s words
spoken while petitions for a new trial were still to be argued before
him: “+Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?+”
A battle of wills then ensued between Joseph Langone, the funeral
director, whose license would be at stake if trouble occurred, and
Mary Donovan. The struggle was soon over. The photographers went ahead
with their work, and Mary Donovan stepped outside, where the crowd of
eight thousand was waiting, and handed her placards to a newspaper man
to copy. As they were being returned to her a Sergeant of the Police
snatched them from her, and another struggle was begun. It culminated,
despite the attempt of Gardner Jackson and Powers Hapgood to defend
her, in her arrest on two charges: first, inciting to riot; second,
distributing anarchistic literature.
Mary Donovan, whether her action at this time was well-judged or not,
was within her rights in permitting the reporters to copy her placards.
As far as the distribution of anarchistic literature is concerned,
the “literature” involved was of the making of Judge Webster Thayer
who might dislike having his phrases called anarchistic. Mary Donovan
herself is a registered member of a political party whose tenets are
opposed to those of anarchy,--I mean that political party known as the
Socialist Party of the United States. She was given six months on each
count or a year in prison, and her case is still to be called.
Saturday night was gone and Sunday had come. Sunday noon the March of
Sorrow was scheduled to begin the long traversing on foot of some eight
miles to Forest Hills where the last ceremony was to be held and the
bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti cremated. From the steps and portico of
Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Boston a waiting crowd was looking out upon a
far greater throng which packed Tremont Street to the curb. To Beacon
Hill and that State House already barred to the marchers by road signs
and trucks placed end on end across all entrances to it, the Common
rose in gradual ascent.
This day and hour of August twenty-eighth, 1927, was as rain and wind
swept as a November day, with dead leaves falling from trees still
green. Many of those who stood upon the portico steps, not a few who
stirred upon the Common, believing in the leadership and healing
power of ideal action, must have touched the thought of this Boston
of 1927 with its American Tragedy of Injustice and its memories
of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison as one touches the
inexplicable,--something of amazement and fear both in their thoughts.
What did it all mean? Or Italian by birth, minds sought refuge during
those gray and solemn hours by a grave in the Campo Santo, Genoa,
with its legend “+PRO VITA NUOVA+,” remembering Mazzini and phrases
revealing his suffering and his triumph.
On Hanover Street, within Defense Headquarters, and a few doors away
on the opposite side of the street at Langone’s, since early morning
preparations had been going forward,--all was “business like.” At ten
the Funeral Chapel had been closed. But thousands had seen those faces,
alabaster in death, of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler. From
Defense Headquarters word was being passed out that the March of Sorrow
was to begin at one o’clock. There still, all was quiet and the one
thought that they must bury their dead. Not permitted to begin the
march with the famous red arm band about the sleeve--+Remember, Justice
Crucified! August 22, 1927+--word was passed out to put the bands into
pockets until a certain point on the marching route had been reached.
For hours throngs of mourners had been gathering in the North End all
along the quarter of a mile between the Funeral Chapel and North End
Park. Waiting open cars had been filled to overflowing with scarlet
flowers, and on foot many volunteers were to bear crimson wreaths. Then
the pallbearers carried out the coffins to the waiting hearses. Led by
two closed cars, one containing Mrs. Sacco and Miss Vanzetti, Aldino
Felicani and Dante Sacco, the other empty and waiting for the moment
when the members of the Defense Committee should step into it from the
head of the marching ranks, at a signal the great cortège fell into
step, arm linked to arm, the motors in the cars began to throb, and the
March of Sorrow was begun.
And it was begun to the pounding of horses’ hoofs, for at the head
and on either side of the hearse and the two closed cars rode mounted
State police clad in black raincoats and hats. The official intent was
scarcely that of honoring the dead, yet the escort was not unlike that
given to dead kings. To the thought of Mary Donovan and other members
of the Defense from a letter returned the words of Vanzetti: “Such
treatment formerly was given only to saints and kings.”... All those
eight miles from Scollay Square to Forest Hills the thunder of those
hoofs beat upon the ears of those who mourned.
At first, Alfred Baker Lewis said, the attitude of the police was
strictly neutral. But when they saw that a procession of some fifty
thousand people had determined, despite the rain, to pay honor to these
two martyrs their attitude changed. From the start a procession unique
in the history of human experience both for numbers and in the length
of the route covered encountered difficulties. First the police had
heavy trucks set close together all across the street and directly
in the way of the line of march. In the attempts of the marchers to
get through or around obstacles, one man was injured by being pushed
through a plate glass window. But the marchers did get around the
trucks and reform the procession.
In the gray and rain of Scollay Square, where fog was drifting in and
pools of water were collecting, the police charged the line and started
clubbing, and a detail of the mounted police rode straight into the
column. A man on the sidewalk, indignant at the unprovoked attack on
the marchers, swore at the police--to do this to the Boston police
is to break much more than a tenth of the decalogue--and the man was
arrested and taken to the police station. By such methods the police
succeeded in “clearing” Scollay Square, but they could not keep it
cleared. Quietly, steadily, the thousands of mourners came on, some
filtering through the police cordon, others making detours, and again
forming a column of solid ranks, arm linked to arm, twenty abreast.
Past Scollay Square, a brave salute to the police, out came the red
arm bands. And now arm linked in arm, step perfect, the inscription on
those arm bands repeated, repeated, repeated, itself in rhythm to the
marching multitudes: “+Remember--Justice Crucified! August 22, 1927.+”
The long wavering line of flame under rain,--human hearts, crimson
flowers, the undulating thousands of red arm bands, the hearses bearing
the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti,--the great cortège of Sorrow went on.
Upon the steps and within the portico of Saint Paul, from the Common,
the waiting throngs saw them coming. In the minds of those who watched
and those who marched echoed the words of the Silent Ones behind
whom the great concourse was marching: “Our words--our lives--our
pains--nothing! The taking of our lives--lives of a good shoemaker and
a poor fish peddler--all! That last moment belongs to us--that agony is
our triumph!”
The sweeping tide of human beings had moved slowly up Hanover Street,
packed from curb to curb behind those shining hearses, behind the
crimson flowers, and was whittled at by the police during the entire
eight miles to Forest Hills Cemetery. Undaunted by either violence or
the black skies gathering more and more rain, the cortège reformed
again and again, and went on,--the human spirit of justice establishing
its integrity and achieving in sorrow its purpose. The love of those
who marched was not unlike the love of Those Two borne along the miles
of all that way, and from whose dead lips, age after age, would be
scattered the truth for which they had given their lives, “ashes and
sparks ... among mankind.”
On that day those who seemed to be in control were the Boston police,
and they did their bit towards educating the multitudes. It was not,
perhaps, the education which they thought they were giving. It was
rather like a lesson Louis Rabinowitz saw taught at the corner of the
Boston Common and of Charles Street. As the March of Sorrow, heckled
by the police, struggled forward, the “pupil” whom the police took in
hand was a typical American youth,--100 per cent American, clothes and
brains. Pressed against the picket fence of the Charles Street Mall he
was much amused at the plight of the funeral cortège as, desperately,
the marchers sought to meet every new obstacle the police set for them,
and at the same time keep order in the marching ranks.
“A sudden charge of the mounted Cossacks,” wrote Louis Rabinowitz of
the Young People’s Socialist League, “brought a smile to his lips.
The slow stiffening of the workers’ lines in the face of vicious
clubbings drove away the smile, to leave instead a wrinkling of the
brows and a look of wonder and respect. As though he wondered at such
courage, and whence it could have sprung. What was the matter? Why
were all these people suffering like that?
“‘Hey, you! Get away from there and run!’ It was the snarling vicious
growl of some mad creature. The youth quickly turned his head and saw
not far distant from himself a beefy, bristling, ‘flat-foot,’ fresh
from clubbing the mourners.
“The young man began to obey the threatening commands and slowly
walked away from the fence to proceed along the path.
“‘Run, I told ye--and keep running. I’ll smash your face in for
you!’ As he uttered this threat the cop rapidly moved after the
youth. The latter, noticing over his shoulder as he walked the
onslaught of the lumbering beef-face with his ever-swinging club,
began to run. Out of breath, the Boston police ‘club-swinger’ stopped
and fiercely shook his fist at the retreating back of his escaping
quarry.
“As the lad ran the look of wonder disappeared from his face. In its
place there grew an expression of grim determination crowned with
the certainty of hope. And as he joined the line of plodding workers
he uttered a single significant remark: ‘Now I know why you are
fighting.’”
But on that day, in those hours, greater than those police masters
was the Master of all Men. “Eloquent, just and mightie Death” had
persuaded. Before the eyes of this American boy, Death was drawing
“together all the farre stretchèd greatness, all the pride, crueltie,
and ambition of man,” and was showing him not only the visible symbols
of courage and brotherhood but also the symbols of stupidity and
injustice.
The police continued to “maintain order,” carving off from the cortège
by every strategy in their power and by force large numbers of the
marching thousands until what had been fifty thousand at Hanover Street
became scarcely two hundred marchers at Forest Hills. They ordered
opposite tides of traffic into the marchers, they even diverted traffic
into the cortège, they threw trucks across the way, they rode straight
into by-standing groups of sympathizers, and they clubbed. All that
those who marched wanted was to reach Forest Hills, there to pay the
last deference to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They did not
want trouble. And they kept on doggedly, forming and reforming in what
Blanche Watson in _The New Leader_ has called their “plodding glory.”
And marching, marching, marching, beside them, unseen, unheard, was
another army,--all the phantasmagoria of many forces, of hope, of
despair, of hate, of love, the death, the life, of all the ages through
which mankind, dusty and travel-stained, has fought his way upwards.
Towards the close of the march the struggles of the cortège with the
police became more acute. But under the leadership of Rose Pesotta and
Alfred Baker Lewis the sympathizers kept on, the police making last
brutal efforts to incite them to violence. More than seven of the eight
miles had been covered in the rain.
Arm linked in arm they were swinging on bravely and silently when
suddenly at Forest Hills Elevated Station came the sharp command, “Get
over there!”
And police charged them, together with an automobile from the station
house in which a patrolman rode down the crowd. Not a half minute was
given the procession to obey before clubs began to swing and marchers
to sprawl. There were curses, blows and kicks, and the guardians of
law and order drew their guns. They were “keeping order,” of course!
Anybody could see that, as by this last violence upon the worn men and
women they succeeded in cutting away more than two-thirds of the brave
and peaceful remnant of all the thousands.
Within almost a stone’s throw of Forest Hills Cemetery, that “third”
slipped into a side street, and reformed.... Again, arm linked to arm,
they swung on through the rain and the fast approaching night, in
perfect order, silent except for their marching steps, on they plodded
that last half mile to the Cemetery where a cordon of state police
denied them entrance. They had kept on to the end. And now, the rain
coming down in torrents, they stood with bared heads before the closed
gates.
There, too, by the Walk Hill entrance stood Professor Ellen Hayes of
Wellesley, and some of her friends. In an automobile they had joined
the funeral procession. But endlessly harassed by the police, they had
detoured and gone directly to the Cemetery. They stood there by the
gates, watching the police jamming and hustling the throngs. They saw
the hearses come and enter the gates. Far behind those hearses and the
following cars brilliant with flowers, they had seen that gallant few
coming, all, as Miss Hayes wrote in _The Relay_, “whom the police and
the rain and the long miles had allowed to come through. Brilliant red
bands gleamed on their arms.” In silence, wishing that they, too, might
have been equal to the long hard march, this group of elderly women
saluted them.
Now within the Chapel the quiet bodies waited till a woman’s tremulous
voice should speak a few unforgettable words in their memory, and
the bodies should be taken into the retort rooms there, again, to
be baptized by fire, yet never to the end to be free from police
surveillance. For even in the Cremation Chamber was to be a parade
of police joking and laughing as fire reduced all that was mortal of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to ash.
The “last” moment had come. The little Chapel would hold no more than
a hundred. Every seat was filled, and a few stood about the walls.
Haggard and white, as those who stand at the foot of the cross, Mary
Donovan read words, written by Gardner Jackson, that for fearless
grandeur will be remembered with the spoken and written words of Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti:
“+Nicola Sacco+ and +Bartolomeo Vanzetti+, you came to America
seeking freedom. In the strong idealism of youth you came as workers
searching for that liberty and equality of opportunity heralded as
the particular gift of this country to all new-comers. You centered
your labors in Massachusetts, the very birthplace of American
ideals. And now Massachusetts and America have killed you--murdered
you because you were Italian anarchists.
“A hundred and fifty years ago the controlling people of this state
hanged women in Salem--charging them with witchcraft. The shame of
those old acts of barbarism can never be wiped out. But they are as
nothing beside this murder which modern Massachusetts has committed
upon you. The witch-burners were motivated by the superstitious fear
of an emotional religion. Their minds were blinded by their selfish
passion to reach Heaven. The minds of those who have killed you are
not blinded. They have committed this act in deliberate cold blood.
For more than seven years they had every chance to know the truth
about you. Not once did they even dare mention the quality of your
characters--a quality so noble and shining that millions have come
to be guided by it. They refused to look. They allowed the bitter
prejudice of class, position and self-interest to close their eyes.
They cared more for wealth, comfort and institutions than they did
for truth. You, Sacco and Vanzetti, are the victims of the crassest
plutocracy the world has known since ancient Rome.
“Your execution is ‘one of the blackest crimes’ in the history of
mankind. It is that and more. Horrible enough would it be if the
killing of you had been ordered by the political and material powers
alone. How much more horrible it is to have this act sanctioned
and even blessed by those who pass among us as the leaders of
intellectual and spiritual power. The blatant exultation with which
they aided in your death is the final sign that the act of killing
you was the act of vengeance of one class--the class dominated by
worship of money and position--against you as symbols of another
class--the workers and all others aspiring to realize the true
meaning of life.
“‘If it had not been for these things,’ said Vanzetti shortly before
his death, ‘I might have lived out my life, talking at street corners
to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now
we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in
our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice,
for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident. Our
words--our lives--our pains--nothing! The taking of our lives--lives
of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler--all! The last moment
belongs to us--that agony is our triumph!’
“By that triumph we are fired with an everlasting fire. Your long
years of torture and your last hours of supreme agony are the living
banner under which we and our descendants for generations to come
will march to accomplish that better world based on the brotherhood
of man for which you died. In your martyrdom we will fight on and
conquer.”
FOOTNOTES:
[8] “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
[9] For letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, _Vide_ “The Letters of Sacco and
Vanzetti,” edited by Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson,
Viking Press, New York.
[10] Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana.
CHAPTER IV
ROMAN HOLIDAY
“From Heaven what sign?
What writing on the wall?
What whisper running along the wind that power and pride shall fall?”
+Joseph T. Shipley.+[11]
On April ninth, five months before, when sentence was pronounced upon
Sacco and Vanzetti, their spoken words had been wise and beautiful. As
the Defense Committee said of them: “No tremor was in their voices,
no uncertainty was in their bearing. Their eyes looked steadfastly
upon the averted face of him who pronounced their doom of burning in
the electric chair. Theirs was the complete fortitude of idealism and
innocence.”
From the brief address of Sacco--barely five hundred words--return not
only the courage but also the courtesy in his generous reference to
Vanzetti as “my Comrade, the kind man to all the children.” And then
those final words spoken to Judge Thayer: “As I said before, Judge
Thayer know all my life, and he know that I am never been guilty,
never--not yesterday, nor to-day, nor forever.”
After that came Vanzetti’s longer speech, answering why sentence of
death should not be passed upon him: “What I say is that I am innocent,
not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime.
That I am not only innocent of these crimes, but in all my life I have
never stolen and I have never killed and I have never spilled blood.
That is what I want to say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent
of these two crimes, not only in all my life have I never stolen, never
killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I
began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.”
Then had come the pause in which Vanzetti had paid tribute to Debs:
“There is the best man I ever cast my eyes upon since I lived, a man
that will last and will grow always more near to and more dear to the
heart of the people, so long as admiration for goodness, for virtues,
and for sacrifice will last. I mean Eugene Victor Debs.... He has said
that not even a dog that kills chickens would have found an American
jury to convict it with the proof that the Commonwealth has produced
against us.”
These two “criminals” were like that other “criminal” Debs of whom
Clarence Darrow said that his only weakness was his honesty.
And then another pause, this time in courteous apology because
Vanzetti must speak some harsh words to Judge Thayer: “I am sorry to
say this because you are an old man, and I have an old father.”
Finally had come the close on these ringing words: “I am suffering
because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered
because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered
more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so
convinced to be right that you can only kill me once but if you could
execute me two time, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would
live again to do what I have done already.”
To men like Dr. Dewey and Dr. Morton Prince, having within their grasp
mental tools by which to test the guilt or innocence of those accused
of crime, that Dedham courthouse might well have seemed but the cave
of men living some twenty thousand years ago and the “law” the club
which those primitive men had wielded. At the end of “Psychology and
Justice,” published in the _New Republic_, Dr. Dewey writes: “The
committee’s sole reference to the conduct of Mr. Thompson is that, upon
occasion, his conduct indicated that ‘the case of the defense must be
rather desperate’ for him to resort to the tactics attributed to him.
Well, events, in which the committee had their share, indicate that
the plight of the defendants was indeed desperate; and Mr. Thompson,
above all others, had occasion to realize how tragically desperate.
But, quite apart from the committee’s own conviction of the guilt
of the accused, it was known to them that Mr. Thompson was equally
convinced of their innocence; that he was conservative in his social
and political views; that, at great sacrifice of time, of social and
professional standing, he had made a gallant fight for the accused
out of jealous zeal for the repute of his own state for even-handed
justice. Yet their sole reference to him is by way of a slur. I see
but one explanation of such lack of simple and seemingly imperative
generosity of mind.... Sacco and Vanzetti are dead. No discussion
of their innocence or guilt can restore them to life. That issue is
now merged in a larger one, that of our methods of ensuring justice,
one which in turn is merged in the comprehensive issue of the tone
and temper of American public opinion and sentiment, as they affect
judgment and action in any social question wherein racial divisions and
class interests are involved. These larger issues did not pass with the
execution of these men. Their death did not, indeed, first raise these
momentous questions. They have been with us for a long time and in
increasing measure since the War. But the condemnation and death of two
obscure Italians opened a new chapter in the book of history. Certain
phases of our life have been thrown into the highest of high lights.
They cannot henceforth be forgotten or ignored. They lie heavy on the
conscience of many, and they will rise in multitudes of unexpected ways
to trouble the emotions and stir the thoughts of the most thoughtless
and conventional.”
During those thirteen days of Boston history there were men and women,
millions of them, all over the United States and in many parts of the
world who, not very well-read in history and without either philosophy
or experience to prepare them for such events as those dramatized, were
robbed of their faith in the integrity of national life, stripped of
confidence in American justice, and heart-broken by this spectacle of
brutality. Before their eyes they saw what Samuel Taylor Coleridge one
hundred years and more ago had described as the special danger of his
own Georgian era: “An inward prostration of the soul before enormous
power, and a readiness to palliate and forget all iniquities to which
prosperity had wedded itself.”
These events they had to see without the perspective of history,
with its tracings of the wavering line of progress, to correct the
distortions of present suffering. It is they, honest, uncompromising,
only in part educated, and their children’s children, who will make
the revolutionists of the future. For the automatic answer of history
to injustice has ever been revolution. And they read about or saw or
were aware of acts of rejoicing that Massachusetts had taken the stand
she had both through her official and committee representatives and
unofficially, and that the men were “out of the way.”
But one, and the latest, manifestation of this spirit to which
Heywood Broun calls attention in the February 15, 1927, issue of the
_Nation_ was the banquet at the Copley Plaza at which seven hundred
Dartmouth men cheered Judge Webster Thayer for five minutes. As
orgiastic as the persecution of Christians on some Roman holiday
must that wah--hoo--wahing of Dartmouth have sounded in many ears.
And, as Heywood Broun says, “If truth and right dogged every step of
Massachusetts justice in the case still there would be reason to object
to long cheers for an electrocution.”... For the sake of Dartmouth
history it should not pass unobserved that much of this cheering
was, it may be, not so much intended _for_ Judge Thayer as _against_
Professor Richardson of Dartmouth who had testified to the judicial
impropriety of Judge Thayer’s statements out of court.
Hardest of all was it for the idealistic young to see, and know, these
things. Denied by their youth that cool-headedness, logic, strategy,
experience, which they would have used towards ideal ends, they saw
these weapons being used by those in power towards the thwarting of the
issue of justice. Nevertheless, even as the older people had still
believed up to the end that strong organization might help, so had the
young believed that, with desperate effort, truth and goodness would
at last prevail. And both had seen their desperate efforts and their
measures fail.
Even within the committees so bravely at work for the defense of
these two Italians, for those who cared to do so, it was possible to
observe angles of selfishness, egotisms struggling for personal power.
It was possible to hear words spoken which were foul or blasphemous,
statements made which were not based on truth. Although it is common to
do so, because of the sentimentalizing of Christianity, historically it
would be a mistake to assume that those who stand at the foot of the
cross, whether in the first century or the twentieth, are blameless.
If, later, those who not only had come together but who had worked
together fell apart, even fell to quarreling, that was not what
mattered. What did matter was that for the time being all, however
separated by class or character, were humane in intention; and all,
however hopeless the issue, struggled together for justice.
To such a nucleus for constitutional justice as the Defense Committee
itself is, the seven bitter years had revealed the worst there was
to know about American politics and decadent aspects of capitalism.
With eyes wide open to the truth, Mary Donovan wrote: “Do not worry
about me--I may go to jail and I may not, but however my case ends we
all realized that the authorities would demand some payment, for our
agitation of the past years, and who would pay, but those of us who
have never received, or expected to receive, any compensation but the
knowledge that we were and are right?”
The Committee and its attorneys felt, and will always feel as no one
else can, the mental courage of Sacco and Vanzetti. This strength
Attorney Thompson, in no sense sharing their social views, has set
down about Vanzetti in a record published in the February, 1928,
_Atlantic Monthly_: “In this closing scene the impression of him
which had been gaining ground in my mind for three years was deepened
and confirmed--that he was a man of powerful mind, of unselfish
disposition, of seasoned character, and of devotion to high ideals.
There was no sign of breaking down or of terror at approaching death.
At parting he gave me a firm clasp of the hand and a steady glance,
which revealed unmistakably the depth of his feeling and the firmness
of his self-control.”...
In August, during these thirteen days of indecision, many generous
minds grieved because they thought men’s hearts were dead. Whether
these minds were liberal or conservative or radical, they were alike
in seeing that in this crisis of injustice the selfishness of class
warfare and social ignorance were in the ascendant. Here were race
hatreds, and their senescent forms in the institutionalism of court
and state. Here, working their will, were unscrupulous ambitions. Here
were riches which had lost all expression of fellowship and sympathy,
as wealth once held in trust for the common good in this country had
kept them, and as wealth here and there still keeps them. John Maynard
Keynes has said in _The End of Laissez-faire_: “I do not know which
makes a man more conservative--to know nothing but the present, or
nothing but the past.”... Here was a death struggle. Here were human
beings who were good about many things but ungenerous or bad about this
issue of justice. Here were indignant angry friends of justice who
spoke of the Clayton anti-trust act in one breath with its guarantee of
free speech and free assemblage, and in the next spoke of the vengeance
of God. Here, too, were men and women whose only wish was to get rid of
men of the Sacco and Vanzetti type.
And, most hopeless reaction of all, coming out of this chaos the
thought: “Thank God, it is over!”
Probably the lowest point in the spirit of _laissez-faire_ was reached
in an editorial in the _Boston Herald_ published the morning after
the execution. The caption of this leading editorial was: BACK TO
NORMALCY. Its concluding paragraph read: “It has been a famous case. It
has attracted the attention of the world to an extent quite without
recent precedent. It has presented phases which no serious student of
our public affairs could fail to regret. _But the time for all such
discussion is over. The chapter is closed. The die is cast. The arrow
has flown. Now let us go forward to the duties and responsibilities of
the common day with a renewed determination to maintain our present
system of government, and our existing social order._”[12]
And there we are with the good old word “tradition” implicit in
“present system” and “existing social order”! The _Herald_ says nothing
of the records of history. And for all its consciousness of evolution,
this editorial--probably written as the men were being executed--might
as well have come from the mountains of Tennessee. “Tradition” should
be a means of communication, a bridge by which human beings step
forward into the future. As soon as it denies the principle of growth
and forbids progress, in short as soon as tradition becomes a barricade
and not a bridge, is it an advantage to human intelligence?
What so often many had read about and glibly discussed, in the
execution prepared for and postponed and prepared for, they had seen
dramatized in class warfare and race hatred. No intelligent student
of issues during that time could fail to perceive decadence in act
after act. The mighty, and triumphant, wish to put an end to Sacco
and Vanzetti was not only an act of hatred for these poor Italians
but also the desire to maintain the _status quo_ in which wealth and
privilege should be able to go upon their way of the world untroubled.
Here was the creed of our present economic system--a creed become
hereditary--taught to the full extent of its powers. Violation by
opinion of the established order of things had been punished by death.
It is not improbable that many who loathed the act done nevertheless
pitied some of those men who did this thing,--men familiar with the
struggles of conscience and the desire to do right, men of moral
integrity, yet caught in this Roman holiday of a brutal economic order
as Marcus Aurelius had been caught in the Roman way of celebration,
which turned Christians into burning torches. Marcus Aurelius, good
and innocent, even tender, “persecuted” the Christians who were good
and innocent. The gravamen of the charge against Marcus Aurelius is
that he allowed the Roman Constitution, with its cruel criminal laws,
to take its way. It is a fact that Roman Stoics of the days of Marcus
Aurelius did not know how pure, how innocent were those Christians
whose persecutions they permitted. It is probable that some of those
who are in power to-day do not know how pure and innocent are some of
these radical idealists.
This was not in Rome but in Boston. This was not the Roman attitude
toward Christianity. This was the attitude of a Christian government
towards the attempt to educate other men along the lines of political
development. These Italians were “pagan” because they were radical, and
the authority which persecuted them was Christian. And the educational
and political elements of the case were “framed” to robbery and murder.
To-day Senator Wheeler knows whether the frame-up is _de facto_ in this
country or not. It has been rather a long history of frame-ups from the
Chicago anarchist cases to the recent disturbances in Colorado and New
Jersey in which corporations either through their own armed guards or
through controlled local police, have carried on warfare reminiscent of
the Middle Ages, bulwarked by a perverted use of the injunction. The
long list of cases sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union adds
its testimony particularly to the prejudiced attitude of many of the
lower courts.
Only the sentimentalist could have failed to see that the truth,
because it was the truth, had no power whatever to stay these
executions. The sole advantage during those days of indecision which
truth had was not temporal, but that, although truth might be “killed”
symbolically in the patient bodies of two humble Italian idealists, it
could not be put out. Consumed by the fire of their own acts these two
would rise again. Immortality by means of the resurrection of truth
was theirs, and they knew it. Yet a strange thing had been done: in
a country which had been established by those who were radicals in
religious opinion, two who were radical in political thought had been
executed.
It was plain that those in power did not hold their authority in
what has been called “the consent of the governed,” but from some
other control. For, as we could see, the “governed” had no power
whatsoever. We were put through the gesture of being consulted, of
being considered. We were kept in a “politic” state of hopefulness.
But behind it all something we never saw, that never became definite,
was in control, and waiting to strike. And it was equally plain that
whatever this Power was, it considered these executions politically,
socially, morally, desirable. For some this Presence incorporated
itself in the word “Reaction.” For others it found explanation in a
“Fear Complex” or “Capitalism” or “Class Warfare.” For still others it
found exact definition in what James Oneal has called “the drift to
Empire,” and in which Sacco and Vanzetti were but one episode in more
than fifty years of preparation.
During those days in Boston the police were an outward manifestation
of the real mastery. No doubt many of them were performing what they
thought was their duty and probably their sense of duty was in many
instances not consciously servile. Yet they, too, were prostrating
themselves before a Presence that was never seen,--a Presence of
Enormous Power. And for the sake of “Prosperity” they were ready to
palliate and forget. This Presence was not the Governor, though he
represented it. It was not President Lowell and the Committee, though
they expressed it. It was not Chief of Police Crowley though his
uniform seemed to be its livery. It was not Warden Hendry though he was
its kindly jailer. It was not even Judge Webster Thayer though he was
the mouthpiece of its law.... Is it not true that it is society which
prepares the so-called “crime,” and that the “criminal” is but the tool
which executes it? And when “society” prepares two innocent men for
the electric chair what is to be said of the inversions of so-called
justice?[13]
FOOTNOTES:
[11] From “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.
[12] The italics are mine.
[13] Conspicuous among friends who were not only loyal over many years
to the condemned men but who also understood many of the forces at work
in this inversion of so-called justice were Alice Stone Blackwell,
Mrs. Cerise Jack, Sacco’s teacher of English; Amleto Fabbri, Secretary
of the Defense Committee, 1924-’26; Mrs. Gertrude L. Winslow, Leonard
Abbott, Roscoe Pound, Francis H. Bigelow, Mrs. Elsie Hillsmith;
Mrs. Virginia MacMechan, Vanzetti’s teacher during six years of his
imprisonment; Maude Pettyjohn, Mrs. E. A. Codman, and H. W. L. Dana.
For letters to these and others among the greatest friends of the
condemned men, _vide_ “The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,” edited by
Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, The Viking Press.
CHAPTER V
OUT OF CHAOS
“Let us make new propellers,
Go past old spent stars
And find blue moons on a new star path.
“Let us make pioneer prayers.
Let working clothes be sacred.
Let us look on
And listen in
On God’s great workshop
Of stars ... and eggs ...”
+Carl Sandburg.+[14]
At the time of a recent presidential election, a straw vote was taken
by the faculty of a midwestern college, which included the straw vote
of thirty-five of the professors. Seven voted for Cox, twenty-five for
Harding, and three for Debs.
Shortly afterwards an agitated citizen met one of the vote tellers on
the street.
Said the citizen, “Is it so that three of the teachers voted for Debs?”
“Yes,” said the teller, “I counted the votes, and I know that three of
the teachers voted for Debs.”
“Are they going to let them stay?” asked the agitated citizen.
“Twenty-five voted for Harding,” came the reply, “and they are going to
let them stay.”
And with the years do not the implications, both ways, of that answer
seem to have increased rather than diminished?
Here is Billy Sunday denouncing, in some of the mildest of his phrases,
the radical,--in this particular case Eugene Victor Debs: “I’m dead
against the radical in whatever form he may appear. He’s the bird I’m
after. America, I call you back to God!”
And then this is the way Billy Sunday goes on to call America back
to God: “These radicals would turn the milk of human kindness into
limburger cheese and give a pole cat convulsions. If I were the
Lord for about five minutes, I’d smash the bunch so hard--” but the
remainder is too coarse to repeat.
So much for the generous and sensitive English of a reactionary Billy
Sunday!
Here is the Radical Debs speaking in condemnation of the Bolshevistic
use of power in the execution of the Czar and his family: “I recoil
with horror and shame that such savagery should be committed in the
name of Socialist justice that has for its aim and purpose the setting
up of the higher standards of human conduct. I can find no extenuating
circumstances that would allow me to take the life of my bitterest
enemy.... We shall not wrest any justice or kindness out of life by
emulating the practices of those whose barbaric method we now denounce.”
In one respect--possibly in several--society to-day is scientifically
in advance of that public which some four hundred years ago killed
Galileo because he performed a scientific experiment. And it does
not make torches out of Christians for festal reasons on our “Roman”
holidays.
But what happens when there is any attempt to perform a political
experiment? What happens when men seek to educate other men by means
of the soap box and literature in the possibilities of what they think
would be better ways and better forms of government? The unstated
reply to this question is the story of the end and the beginning at
Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Headquarters.
The future will see that this case was a free-speech case. The present
denies this. Are men to make progress in freedom of religious thought
and speech? Are men to make progress in scientific ways, go forward in
science, but in politics, in government, have no freedom? Who stood
over Pasteur to tell him what he should do with his microscope? And yet
over three hundred years ago men killed Galileo because he tried to
perform experiments with falling bodies.
Some two thousand years ago the Roman people said, “It is more
expedient that one man should die than the people should perish
through the corrupting influence of Jesus.”
A few hundred years earlier the multitude had put Socrates to
death because he had said he did not believe in the gods the city
believed in. In science, using scalpel and microscope, test tube and
spectroscope, men are permitted to go forward. In government, in
political science, is society to condemn all those men and women to
prison in whom the spirit of research lives?[15]
These are some of the questions being asked by intelligent minorities
everywhere. And it is not impossible that as the result of those
thirteen days in Boston intelligent minorities, whether liberal
or conservative, were strengthened in purpose and confirmed in
determination to see that at all costs should be tried the experiment
of a free people governing themselves by means of free assemblage,
free discussion, and legislation that should be just to all,--what Dr.
Holmes has described as “the new mobilizing of conscience for the work
ahead.”
“But,” the Popular Mind says, “the radical is dangerous.”
Is he? What, anyhow, is the Radical?
James Harvey Robinson writes in _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods_: “Some mysterious unconscious impulse appears
to be a concomitant of natural order. This impulse has always been
unsettling the existing conditions and pushing forward, groping after
something more elaborate and intricate than what already existed.
This vital impulse, _élan vital_, as Bergson calls it, represents
the inherent radicalism of nature herself. This power that makes for
salutary readjustment, or righteousness in the broadest sense of
the term, is no longer a conception confined to poets and dreamers,
but must be reckoned with by the most exacting historian and the
hardest-headed man of science.”
In art, at least, radicalism means that nuclear source from which
spring the emotional and social evolution of art. And, one suspects,
in the life of government its meaning is not so very different.
When those in control of government begin to use dead forms of past
experience--say, legal--because they are without sufficient force
or sufficient idealism to create new forms of use to life as men
must live it in the present, then follow injustice and tyranny and
death. It is inevitable that selfish men should fear the change from
one economic order to another. And when for over a hundred years
both the philosopher and the economist have buttressed the practical
individual in believing that in pursuing his own good he is benefiting
the community as a whole, it is small wonder that he insists on the
righteousness of his individualistic or capitalistic point of view. It
is unquestionably true, not alone in political ways but also in some
official “religious” ways, that the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
had been greeted with exultation. John Hays Hammond’s letter of praise
to Governor Fuller will be remembered. Bishop Lawrence’s letter to
Governor Fuller will not be forgotten,--the congratulations of a
Bishop of Christ for the decision to kill two men. What light do those
“congratulations” throw on what many had believed to be the move for
investigation on the part of liberal opinion?
For the present the power lies in the hands of individualists and
reactionaries, and many social radicals--as, for example, Mooney and
Billings--are in prison, or they have died from the hardships of their
prison experience, or have been executed. The bogy of fear--since they
are not conscience free--possesses many who are in power, and they find
a thousand subtle ways to infect the public mind with fear of those
changes which they themselves dread.[16]
The execution at midnight on August twenty-second was no sudden and
hideous grimace of fate. The preparation for this act of injustice was
implicit in the history of over half a century. In an editorial in the
_New Leader_ for August 13, 1927, James Oneal wrote: “There comes a
time in the history of nations when various phases of their development
come to a focus and signify the need of change. The old order changeth
and the new order issues out of the old. The old faiths, old views,
old war cries that once served mankind no longer serve. They harden
into prejudice and become the handmaids of reaction and despotism. They
become imbedded in law, are sanctioned by courts, and become fetters
on human progress. Eventually the fetters are broken, we enter a new
epoch, mankind rejoices, progress continues until a new crisis is
brought because new faiths, views and war cries have again become old.”
In this connection it might be well not only to remember Douglas and
Dred Scott, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, but also _not_ to forget
Mitchell Palmer and his relation to the so-called “Red Raids.” To give
only one example, the Rand School books and furniture were destroyed
by Palmer’s Cossacks of the law, and men and women thrown down stairs
and out of windows. It might still be well to do what the _Nation_
recommended as far back as 1921: “Turn the Light on Palmer.” The files
of the Department of Justice, opened on request for such a pitiable
psychotic type as the wife-murderer Remus, are still to be opened to
help in clearing the names of two innocent Radicals who have been put
to death.
It is well _not_ to forget that in 1920 Salsedo, the friend of Sacco
and Vanzetti, was found smashed to pieces on the pavement fourteen
stories below the offices of the Department of Justice on Park Row
where Salsedo had been held _incommunicado_. Was Salsedo tortured
till he went mad and sprang out of the window? Or was he thrown out?
It should be remembered that Sacco and Vanzetti were trying to get up
a meeting about what Alfred Baker Lewis has called Salsedo’s “highly
curious death” when they were arrested. It is well not to forget that
to-day out in the Colorado coal fields, in the interests of justice (!)
peaceful picketers, having not even a club as weapon, have been shot
down by mounted troopers, and that women are being lassoed by these
guardians of the law as steers are lassoed. It is well to remember that
men and women are thrown into prison without even the formality of a
warrant, as Flaming Milka was after she had been lassoed and her wrist
broken by the brutal snapping of handcuffs upon her.
Lincoln, facing the issue of the Dred Scott decision, said: “I believe
that government cannot endure half slave and half free.” This was said
at a time when the Supreme Court had decided that negroes could not be
considered as persons but only as property. That race issue now has but
passed a specious color line, is stalled on the political boundary,
and has gone forward--if it has!--only to rephrase itself economically
as to whether wage-earners are to be considered as persons or only as
property. It would seem that there has been an attempt to answer the
question in Colorado and Pennsylvania by the machine gun and state
police.
Dr. Cohn implies in “Some Questions and an Appeal” that the
consciousness of radicalism in this country has become synonymous
with the consciousness of guilt. It is possible to change the words
“has become” to the words “has been made.” It is well not to forget
the Lusk law whose issues, although some of them have been officially
“killed,” are by no manner of means dead issues. Despite the repeated
courage of expressed opinion and action on the part of Alfred Smith as
Governor of New York State, if the constitutional rights of Socialists
cannot be barred openly, they are still taken from them illegally at
the polls and elsewhere. If there is no legal process by means of which
teachers can be gagged by loyalty tests, other means as efficient, if
less open, are being found. The question of the political control of
all schools in the state by means of the Board of Regents may come
up again, and assuredly will, if now dominant and selfish interests
succeed in herding people into the war which looms so ominously on our
horizon,--and not less so under the influence of President Coolidge’s
1928 Armistice Day speech. And finally, the creation and maintenance of
a police for the suppression of all forms of radicalism is now a fact
and not a theory, however uncodified such action may be on any book
of statutes.... Back in 1923 the _Outlook_ said that Lusk’s proposal
attacked “the fundamental principle of free government--liberty of
speech and of the press.... His proposal enlists against great names
and great memories of the past--the learning of Milton, the piety of
Jeremy Taylor, the satire of Voltaire, the eloquence of Lord Erskine.
It denies the axiom of liberty, that error is dangerless so long as
truth is left free to combat it.”
To-day with a policy as consistent as it is fearless the _Outlook_ says
in the issue of November 14, 1928: “Because in the South Braintree
case, and in the Bridgewater case that preceded it, it was not only
Sacco and Vanzetti but also our administration of justice that was on
trial. If that has failed us then we should know it. We cannot afford
to regard any miscarriage of justice as a closed case. As we value
the future safety of society, our own safety and the safety of our
children, we must be ready to listen and learn.”[17] For these reasons
_The Outlook and Independent_ has reopened the case of Sacco and
Vanzetti first by checking up on the Bridgewater hold-up, and second
by checking up on the South Braintree crime. It is now at work on the
latter.
In the issue of October 31, 1928, were published the signed confession
of Frank Silva who states that he and three others attempted the
Bridgewater hold-up, and corroborative evidence signed by James Mede
who helped plan the crime although he did not take part in it. In
order to substantiate the story further, Silas Bent and Jack Callahan
took James Mede and Frank Silva to Boston where in an automobile they
rehearsed again the crime. After their evidence was complete, Silas
Bent took it to Boston to ask Mr. Thompson whether the attorneys for
the condemned men were ignorant of the facts brought out in the two
confessions, or whether knowing the story, they did not believe it.
In the issue of November 7, 1928, Silas Bent gives a long and valuable
interview with Mr. Thompson in which the latter tells of Mr. Moore’s
attempt to interest Governor Cox in James Mede’s story while James
Mede was in the state prison in 1922; of a meeting with James Mede
after his release from prison while Mr. Moore was still counsel; and of
a meeting with James Mede in July, 1927, when he begged James Mede to
make a clean breast of what he knew.
On July 12, 1927, James Mede made a complete disclosure to Governor
Fuller after he had been assured that his confession would not be
communicated to the state police as he feared the revocation of his
license for boxing matches. After it, Governor Fuller called in Captain
Blye of the state police, asking Mede to repeat his confession to
Captain Blye alone, but indicating “hostility to Mede by words, tone
and manner.” James Mede became terrified and refused not only to
talk with Captain Blye alone but to repeat his story to the advisory
committee, which had already indicated “unwillingness to consider the
Bridgewater case.”
In August James Mede was urged to make another attempt to save
Sacco and Vanzetti. He went to the office of Captain Blye with Dr.
Santosuosso, and offered to make a full confession but his information
was refused. Thus, according to _The Outlook and Independent_, for
five years officials in Massachusetts declined to investigate James
Mede’s story. Not only did Mr. Thompson and Mr. Ehrmann know the facts
regarding James Mede and Frank Silva but they urged the interview
with Governor Fuller and sent both to Governor Fuller and the advisory
committee a letter, dated June 15, 1927, in which was marshaled all
the available evidence bearing on the relation of these two men to
the Bridgewater crime. Mr. Thompson makes clear his belief that James
Mede told the truth, and he states that the conviction of Vanzetti
in the Bridgewater hold-up not only removed from everybody’s mind
the presumption of innocence but created a presumption of guilt both
against Vanzetti and his friend and associate, Sacco.
_The Outlook_ wrote, “We must be ready to listen and learn.” The men
are dead but the issue of justice--that placard repeated and repeated
on the walls of the Defense Committee’s offices, +JUSTICE IS THE
ISSUE+--is not dead. There are many who believe that even from the
technical legal point of view the case for Sacco and Vanzetti is not
closed. Still more know, as well as believe, that not only has this
issue of justice _not_ been killed with the two men but rather that the
idea of justice has been given a new increase of life.
This power of an idea was brilliantly illustrated in the October, 1927,
number of _The World To-morrow_ when under the caption of “Fathers and
Sons” without a line of comment, its editors set the following last
sentences side by side:
_Sacco’s Good-by to His Son_
“My son, do not cry. Be strong to comfort your mother. Take her for
walks in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers, resting beneath
shady trees, and visiting the streams and the gentle tranquillity of
the Mother Nature.
“Do not seek happiness just for yourself. Step down to help the weak
ones who cry for help. Help the persecuted, because they are your
better friends. They are your comrades who fight and fall, as your
father and Barto fought and fell, to conquer joy and freedom for all
the poor workers.”
_Gary’s Advice to His Heirs_
“I earnestly request my wife and my children and descendants that
they steadfastly decline to sign any bonds or obligations of any kind
as surety for any other person or persons: that they refuse to make
any loans except on the basis of first-class, well-known securities,
and that they invariably decline to invest in any untried or doubtful
securities or property or enterprise or business.”
The power of the ideal life has within these recent years found among
others a symbolic figure in Eugene Victor Debs. Upon our entrance into
the World War Debs, even as did Sacco and Vanzetti, upheld pacifism,
and in September, 1918, he was charged with violation of the Espionage
Act, and sent to prison.
Debs would have nothing to do with that type of Christian hypocrisy
which flourishes a Sermon on the Mount in one hand while it operates
a machine gun with the other. Because of his pacifism, this “radical”
Gene Debs, always so fair and so gentle as an opponent, hating no
one, incapable of petty hatreds, was sentenced to spend ten years in
Atlanta Penitentiary.
While he was in Atlanta, he heard of the negro, Sam Moore, shunned and
feared by all, and confined in the dungeon for a brutal murder. Debs
asked to be taken to him; and when he was, he went up to this man whom
no one dared approach and put his arm around him. Emerson has said,
“The only gift is a portion of thyself.” This gift Sam Moore received
from Debs, and it made a different man of that negro, changing him from
one who was shunned by all into one who was trusted. And it was that
same despised negro criminal who said, “Gene Debs is the only Jesus
Christ I ever knew.” Sam Moore is out now, leading an upright, working
life. Debs spent three years in Atlanta Penitentiary, trusted and
beloved. Then on Christmas Day, 1921, President Harding released him.
This is a brief record of the activities of the man who was five times
nominated for President of the United States, one of those times being
while he was in prison when he polled a vote of almost a million. This
is the man who addressed audiences numbering 25,000, and who led the
simple, loving life of a modern Christ; and who, after two years of
study, became at the age of forty-two a Socialist. For Debs socialism
did not mean the doing away with capitalism; it meant, rather, capital
socialized, the brutality, the devastating individualism taken from
it,--a system of living in which man’s sociality, his brotherhood,
would be furthered, in which there would be no bitter and separating
contrasts between rich and poor.
It was this Debs who said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it;
while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in
prison, I am not free.”
It was this man of simple and genuine American traditions, born in an
American family in an Indiana town, a Socialist, of whom the anarchist
Vanzetti said in that last public speech he was to make: “There is
the best man I ever cast my eyes upon since I lived, a man that will
last and will grow always more near to and more dear to the heart of
the people, so long as admiration for goodness, for virtues, and for
sacrifice will last. I mean Eugene Victor Debs.”
Vanzetti was not to hear Aldino Felicani saying of himself and Sacco,
“Ah, these are the very best men I must ever hope to know!”
It is a truism that what a man is, what he does, in his own lifetime
influences his fellow men. The miracle of influence does not lie in
that fact. The miracle of influence lies, rather, in the continued life
of influence after the death of the individual who has exerted it. In
this is found the dynamics of an idea,--directed energy released by
means of an idea which controls social and moral movements, hundreds
of years, thousands of years, after its release,--a poem thousands of
years old to which the heart and mind of man still answer; or a Messiah
whose gospel becomes more potent with the marching centuries. It is
because he possesses such influence, great in a lifetime, but in death
potentially greater than in life, that the idealist, whether he be
liberal or conservative or radical, is, and always will be, dangerous.
The lives of Sacco, Vanzetti, and Debs define, without words, the
significance, the character, and the service of the so-called
“radical.” In symbol the influence of these three, and the influence of
other idealists, will have more and more power as the years go on,--not
greatness gone or greatness vanished, but greatness growing, widening
out forever, their names already known to millions of human beings the
world over, inspiring symbols of courage and of loving-kindness. And in
such symbolism lies the miracle of human influence and its immortality.
In pursuit of the ideal such radicals as Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti
know no fear. For them in the achievement of ideal ends no cost is
too great, neither slander nor loneliness, the loss of the means
of subsistence or of life itself. There is only one loss which the
idealist, whether he be conservative or liberal or radical, can mourn,
and that is the lost opportunity to speak for those who suffer and
are wronged, as Sacco and Vanzetti did suffer and were wronged. That
is why, to use the words of Powers Hapgood, hundreds of thousands in
protest of one sort or another want to “stand up and be counted.”
And, too, as the years go on this is why as symbol in ever-widening
circles of influence the work of the Defense Committee, the courage of
brave friends, as well as the martyrdom of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, over seven long years, and the conflict and defeat of those
last thirteen days, will become greater and greater in men’s eyes.
Ralph Chaplin, who spent five years behind prison bars because he was
and is a man of peace, has in a poem expressed this courage of the
idealist:
“Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie--
Dust unto dust--
The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell--
Too strong to strive--
Each in his steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng--
The cowed and the meek--
Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak!”
FOOTNOTES:
[14] “Good Morning, America,” by Carl Sandburg, p. 26.
[15] For brilliant discussion of political freedom _v._ “Some Problems
of Progress,” by Professor H. M. Dadourian of Trinity College in _The
Scientific Monthly_, edited by J. McKeen Cattell, October, 1922.
[16] As an illustration of terms to which such “fear” will stoop see
Appendix A and Appendix B.... These appendices discuss a few of the
recent notable forces working against freedom of speech.
[17] The series of articles bearing on the case which have been
published by the _Outlook and Independent_ so far is as follows:
“Fear,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, November 9, 1927.
_The Outlook and Independent_, October 31, 1928.
“The Truth About the Bridgewater Hold-up,” p. 1053.
“Frank Silva’s Story,” p. 1055.
“How I Found Frank Silva,” by Jack Callahan, p. 1060.
“Checking Up the Confession,” by Silas Bent, p. 1071.
“The Bridgewater Trial,” p. 1076.
_The Outlook and Independent_, November 7, 1928.
“Checking Up the Vanzetti Story,” by Silas Bent, p. 1099.
_The Outlook and Independent_, November 14, 1928.
“Bridgewater and After,” p. 1163.
APPENDIX A
About the year 1920 to 1921 the “Blue Menace” began to use its three
arms of power: the secret service, a hired police, and signed and
unsigned propaganda against what the “Blue Menace” called the “Red
Menace.”
While Calvin Coolidge was vice president of the United States the
public had under Mr. Coolidge’s signature in the _Delineator_ for
June, 1921, the first of a series of three articles on “Enemies of the
Republic” with a sub-caption of “Are the Reds stalking our college
women?” This happened to be the third year of Debs’ term of ten years
in Atlanta Penitentiary.
It would seem that Mr. Coolidge signed these articles on the Red
Menace but did not write them. Vassar, Barnard, Wellesley, Radcliffe,
and other women’s colleges were “hotbeds of Bolshevism,” etc. But
“Smith Seems Sane,” and Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr escaped slashing
by signature altogether. A “Miss Smith” of the Vassar faculty--too
apparently the entire Smith family could not claim sanity!--had
offended Coolidge democracy by being favorably impressed with the
liberalism of the Soviet ambassador in Washington. Naughty Miss Smith!
“Democracy” as defined by Mr. Coolidge is an over-lord who can do no
wrong. And on the terms of such a definition, in the third of these
articles he proposed this “Coolidgism”: “When a college professor
is disloyal to the government he is no longer a college professor.”
Query: What is he? This question the Poor Professor himself sometimes
alters nowadays to read: Where am I?
Studious, scholarly Dr. Harry Laidler of the League for Industrial
Democracy had, according to the Vice President, been raising the sort
of sulphurous dust in the women’s colleges to which perfect ladies
do not refer. A certain Vida Dalton (Dutton?) Scudder, professor
of English literature at Wellesley, had offended by suggesting in
the _Socialist Review_ in an article with the title “Socialism and
Character” (a vicious title because such a conjunction is impossible of
course!) that Christianity was being exploited for purposes not exactly
Christlike. It would seem that this is a thought that has occurred to
others, too. Freda Kirchwey had erred by showing a “Williams boy” that
Barnard women could define socialism. In addition to all this--_ab
urbe condita_ horror of horrors!--“a Mary Calkins, professor of
philosophy” (she is said to have voted for Debs for President at the
recent election) was guilty of “the creed of Internationalism.” Run in
on the same page (67) of that issue where the vice president stopped
was a short story, and a loitering eye stopped beside this phrase:
“‘Oh, little Eve,’ a sob caught in her own throat, ‘love never dies.’”
Usually the month they are born that kind of love and story do die. But
the kind of love at the heart of Internationalism seems to have spread
from its groups of brave pioneers, among whom was “a Mary Calkins,” and
become a world-wide movement.
In the next article for July the “Coolidgisms” continued. The first
article had been illustrated by a grandmotherly looking wolf,
spectacles on nose--the better to see you, my dears!--and some plump
little lambs among which all college women will recognize themselves
instantly. But this second article has the picture of a thoughtful
young man resting elbow on desk, and resting coiled upon his shoulder
is a hooded cobra. Behind the cobra is a phantom-like figure--evidently
in the minds of Mr. Coolidge and the illustrator intended to be a
menacing figure. It is, rather, for the phantom looks as if under one
interpretation of democracy he had had to stand too long on an American
bread-line.
In this issue Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary and the
Rand School came in for special attention, one of the “Coolidgisms”
being that “the good is never self-existent.” An aspect of this
“Coolidgism” which has, perhaps, not occurred to Mr. Coolidge, is that
idealists--all too many for a “free” democracy--are having to prove
their devotion to the ideal all too often in prison. Some of the themes
of the same issue are “Red Pedagogy,” our public schools, and “Trotsky
_vs._ Washington.” And the article closes under the caption: “In Truth
our Freedom Lies.” This moral fiat will bear looking at twice, and
may cause amusement or discomfort to those who penetrate its sinister
inversions.
The third article in the August issue, also we understand “collected”
for Mr. Coolidge and then signed by him, has a heavy muscular young
woman seated on the prostrate back of a Russian bear whose tongue is
lolling out helplessly as she jabs a two-edged sword down through the
back of Brother Bear. Study of the young woman’s features, her figure
and her draperies, suggests that she has just stepped down from the
Statue of Liberty in order to take this firm seat. Whether the bear is
_de facto_ or not the Soviet government, there are some weak “radicals”
who may find both the young woman and the sword of “righteous
authority” a bit brutal, or at least lacking in Franciscan symbols of
Christianity.
“Righteous authority” is the pivot thought on which this third and
last article in the _Delineator_ by Calvin Coolidge is swung. During
many years now Mr. Coolidge has wielded supreme authority in the
United States, among other acts carrying on an unauthorized war
against Nicaragua, and lending his silence, if not his articles, to
an unauthorized man-hunt not only for Sandino outside the confines
of the United States, but also for brave liberals in the schools,
the colleges, the churches, and the labor organizations, who dare to
interpret the truth in the developing formulæ, political as well as
educational and religious, of a developing humanity.
APPENDIX B
There is one address comment upon which it would be my wish to omit
from any summary of forces working against freedom of speech. The man
who gave this address in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on June 30, 1927, to
the Kiwanis, is himself kind to little children. He has been thoughtful
of their welfare both in legislation and control; eager for the safety
of the road and for the reduction of needless human suffering. But the
author of this address, which appeared first in the _Boston Traveller_
for June 30th and of which afterward some seventy-five thousand copies
were printed for distribution, leaves the student of these issues no
honorable choice except to analyze the speciousness of his statements.
Frank A. Goodwin begins this address, which is said to have turned the
tide of public opinion--the tuning fork from which Governor Fuller
took his pitch--with an implied compliment on the Lawrence handling
of the strikes and the “Red murderers” who had been at that time in
action. Having established an association between the character of
what the Kiwanians had seen in Lawrence and Sacco and Vanzetti whom
they had not seen, Mr. Goodwin then took about one hundred and fifty
words out of the context of a speech by Edward H. James, the nephew
of William James, which had been given at Winter Garden in Lawrence
on May 27th. Mr. Goodwin refers to these words which, however bravely
meant, inevitably would be prejudicial in conservative eyes, as coming
from the “Socialist or Red.” Since when have Socialists and Soviets
been hand in glove? If they have been, then the altogether delightful
“glove” the Socialists have received in Russia has been wholesale
imprisonment! This is the first of those inaccuracies with which this
pamphlet teems, and on the basis of which public opinion was still
further influenced.
The Socialists have themselves been time and again “broken” by the
_status quo_. But in turn as a political party they have broken
nothing,--not even the driest twig of government, for their ways are
the slow constitutional ways of education and legislation. But now, as
far as Frank Goodwin’s audience was concerned, he had tied together
“Red murderers” in the Lawrence strike, a nephew of William James,
socialism, Soviet Russia, and two philosophic Anarchists. Breaking
all the speed laws of reasoning, Mr. Goodwin then established the
guilt as murderers of Sacco and Vanzetti, sideswiping, as he did so,
“pacifists and their college professor allies” in preventing murderers
“from getting their just deserts.” Stepping on the gas, and traveling
at the rate of a Studebaker “Sheriff,” Mr. Goodwin whizzes down on
Professor Felix Frankfurter, Anita Whitney, Mooney and Billings, the
American Civil Liberties Union, R-revolution (!), and a few other road
obstructions.
By this time Mr. Goodwin is getting his car so well in hand that it
will take almost any fence. He hurdles California, skids as he reaches
“some ministers of the Gospel,” rights himself, and lands squarely in
the midst of the “Lusk Investigating Committee” where he was really at
home. All might have been well, but pulling out the throttle, the then
Registrar of Motor Vehicles goes roaring forward onto a paragraph with
the caption of “WHOSE BRAINS GUIDE.” In this little paragraph, with
his careful use of words, he rolls James Maurer, tosses “the notorious
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,” Dean Roscoe Pound, and a few tender little
Socialists like Morris Hillquit, Scott Nearing, Norman Hapgood, Upton
Sinclair, ricochets on Professor Frankfurter, and goes smash into Roger
Baldwin, William Z. Foster, and Lenin.
His Sheriff being provided with a wonder-working bumper, despite
collision on he goes, though in exactly the opposite direction.
Neither geography nor the direction in which Mr. Goodwin is now going
is any longer a matter of importance to him. He happens to be in the
Connecticut Valley but does not know it! For just ahead he has seen
a group which he calls “College Professors Reds,” and he is in full
flight. Mr. Goodwin shows his genuine Americanism by baiting the
college professor, the worm of our national wit. What is more the
“professors” here excoriated are in the leading colleges for women.
But it is a long worm that has no turning, and apparently these poor
down-trodden things have turned. It would seem they are making a direct
assault on the human family, for Mr. Goodwin writes:
“Another obstacle is the home and the family, and a widespread
assault is now being made on the sanctity of marriage and sacred
family relations, and it is being made with great success in
the leading colleges for women, and small wonder, for we find
the presidents and professors of most of them members of the
Baldwin-Foster committee, or its allied organizations.”
Exactly what is this Baldwin-Foster Committee to which Mr. Goodwin
refers with such precision? But no matter, and there you are, all tied
up again and together: the “promiscuity” of our women’s colleges and
college women in general, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Pulling out the
choke of his trick car Mr. Goodwin rushes up over the Amherst Notch,
screeching through Old Hadley, making a record run down upon the
Hankins questionnaire in Northampton. He wrenches a few of this college
instructor’s misguided questions altogether out of their context,
thereby subverting their sociologic intention. Waving these questions
indignantly, Mr. Goodwin honks out this paragraph:
“It may be interesting to note that almost 100% of the presidents and
teachers in these colleges for women have signed petitions for the
release of Sacco and Vanzetti. It might be well before long for the
various states to found and support colleges for women where decency
and morality will be taught.”
Those who have taken a prurient interest in the questions selected by
Mr. Goodwin would do well to read the entire questionnaire. However
much the keen scholar who is at the head of Smith, and Mr. Hankins
himself, and other college professors, and presidents, may have
regretted what seems a lack of judgment shown in a few of the questions
asked, those who read the questionnaire as a whole will get, not the
false perspective of Mr. Goodwin’s methods but a true perspective of
the whole sociologic enquiry. And in conclusion, what in the world is
the connection between a class questionnaire and the Sacco-Vanzetti
frame-up?
At the top of page 11 the Sheriff had grazed Dr. S. Parkes Cadman.
This was unfortunate, for now Mr. Goodwin, for reasons no one can
understand, Dr. Cadman least of all, is headed directly upon the
Garland Fund. He now charges Robert Morss Lovett, Lewis Gannett, Norman
Thomas, Roger Baldwin (of course!), the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
the Fellowship of Youth for Peace, and returns to the Federal Council
of Churches and Emma Goldman. This return must surprise many, including
Emma Goldman herself. Since when has her association with the Federal
Council of Churches been established as even the remotest possibility?
Mr. Goodwin is now going at a record-breaking pace. Two-thirds down the
page, his car fairly leaps into the air, and the one-time Registrar of
Motor Vehicles is heard speaking these words:
... “The time has come to stop treating this thing as a joke. An
organized minority, bent on evil, cannot be ignored, when led
by desperate, unscrupulous, able men, with unlimited money, and
particularly when aided, regardless of their motives, by those who
control our colleges, and the Federal Council of Churches.”
Mr. Goodwin, now being profoundly stirred, is at his best in such
penetrating remarks as this: “An organized minority, bent on evil.”
Will some of the members of the Federal Council of Churches, Dr. Cadman
and Bishop McConnell, for example, please step forward and explain why
they are so naughty! And after they have been heard, will a judicious
selection from the Presidents of the demoralized colleges for women,
President Neilson, President Woolley, President MacCracken, please
explain to an anxious public why, despite the fact that no one of them
is even that mildest of all “Reds,” a constitutional Socialist, they
are always called “Red”? Is the _Manchester Guardian Weekly_ right
when it says: “There are, perhaps, too many societies of one sort or
another in the world already, but there seems to be a real need for
one addition--a Society for the Protection of Good Americans from the
Publicity which is Awarded to the Others.” Surely, no matter what
Mr. Goodwin and some thousands among other notable groups such as the
Daughters of the American Revolution owe them, by way of apology, the
college presidents must understand that they owe the public a pleasant
explanation for the reasons why Mr. Goodwin and others should be
allowed to slander them.
But the Registrar of Motor Vehicles and his Sheriff are growing tired.
Despite the fact that up and down several pages he has been scooping
the Connecticut Valley, Mr. Goodwin failed to refer to Waldo Cook and
the _Springfield Republican_, and none have done more valiant service
for freedom of speech and justice than these two. With weariness there
comes upon Mr. Goodwin the meditative spirit. He is slowing down; he is
going to shut off his motor; and one of the boldest drives to demolish
truth ever undertaken is almost over,--certainly since the Mitchell
Palmer, Lusk and _Delineator_-Coolidge days. As he dreams, peaceful
voices are heard, and he invokes the American Legion, Veterans of
Foreign Wars, Spanish War Veterans, and other such non-militant (!)
organizations. Reaching the last page all are found joining hands with
the Daughters of the American Revolution. It is a pretty picture of
accord, except for the fact that one is left wondering whether even the
genial Daughters would have quite enough hands to go around....
In her series of “Blue Menace” articles which appeared in the
_Springfield Republican_ from March 19 to 27, 1928,[18] Elizabeth
McCausland has given clearly the factors which lie behind the
so-called “blacklists” and the final outbursts of the D.A.R.: the
activities of the Palmer deportation raids, the Lusk legislative
committee, the Key Men of America, the Industrial Defense Association
with Headquarters at Boston, the Massachusetts Public Interests League,
together with the activities of many other reactionary organizations,
whose use of data was often as inaccurate as it was reactionary.
Is it on the basis of such carefully compiled data as these by Mr.
Goodwin that the public is to draw its conclusions with regard to the
value of the service of our educational and religious organizations,
and with regard to the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti? In
such material as that cited is the level of a primitive mentality, the
taboos and spooks, specters and witch doctors of savages,--in short a
reversion to physical levels down to which graft and greed, selfishness
and sensuality, are fast taking the American public. Is it this
senescence of the reasoning power that is to convince people at large
that idealists--sneered at by the business interests of the country--in
education and religion and government are murderers and criminals?
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Now compiled in pamphlet form under title of “The Blue Menace,”
and published by the _Springfield Republican_. Price 10 cents.
APPENDIX C
This list represents the first five hundred protestants who replied by
wire or letter to letters or telegrams sent out by Paul U. Kellogg,
editor of _The Survey_. The letters and telegrams which went out to
the large list bore the following signatures: Jane Addams, Frederic
Almy, Charles A. Beard, Bruce Bliven, Charles C. Burlingham, Waldo
Cook, John Dewey, John Lovejoy Elliott, Haven Emerson, Ernest Freund,
Alice Hamilton, Norman Hapgood, Paul U. Kellogg, Dora Lewis, Margaret
Homer Shurtleff, Henry R. Seager, Mary E. Woolley. In many cases
replies were received from summer homes and resorts. This list is here
given alphabetically, but, except where the names occur in the text of
“Thirteen Days,” these names are not listed again in the Index.
Abbott, Miriam Worcester, Massachusetts
Abby, M. J. Colorado Springs, Colorado
Adams, Lida S. Whitefield, New Hampshire
Addams, Jane Chicago
Allen, Mary L. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Almy, Frederick Buffalo
Amberson, Wm. R. University of Pennsylvania
Amidon, Beulah New York City
Amidon, Charles F. Fargo, North Dakota
Andrews, Esther New York City
Antin, Mary Great Barrington, Massachusetts
April, Reba Chicago
Arms, Katharine Fuller Greenfield, Massachusetts
Arthur, Katharine Philadelphia
Arthur, Mary Philadelphia
Aub, T. Huntington, New York
Bailey, Forrest New York City
Baker, Edith M. Northampton, New Hampshire
Baldwin, Ruth Standish Gloucester, Massachusetts
Ball, Steadman Topeka, Kansas
Barasch, William Brooklyn, New York
Barbour, Elizabeth Poughkeepsie, New York
Barbour, Violet Poughkeepsie, New York
Barnard, Anne New York City
Barry, Grace Ashland, New Hampshire
Bass, Basil N. New York City
Beard, Charles A. New Milford, Connecticut
Beard, Charles R. New York City
Bearse, Mary New York City
Beck, Dr. and Mrs. F. Asbury Park, New Jersey
Beck, Isabel, Dr. Asbury Park, New Jersey
Belson, Heinrich Brighton, Massachusetts
Bemis, Evelyn New York City
Bergmann, Henry H. Washington, D. C.
Bernstein, Sadie Chicago
Bigelow, Francis Hill Cambridge, Massachusetts
Binger, Dr. Carl A. L. New York City
Binger, Clarinda G. New York City
Bingham, G. W. Boston
Birchard, C. C. New York City
Birtwell, Frances M. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Bliven, Bruce New York City
Blumberg, Dorothy Brooklyn, New York
Blumberg, Philip Brooklyn, New York
Bockius, Elizabeth G. Whitefield, New Hampshire
Bockius, Frances G. Whitefield, New Hampshire
Bollman, Mary Woodstock, New York
Bontecou, Eleanor Cambridge, Massachusetts
Boretz, Mary E. New York City
Bradford, Esther Philadelphia
Bradford, Robert Philadelphia
Brenk, Deltev W. Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Bronfenbrenner, Jacques Rockefeller Institute
Brown, Geoffrey C. East Orange, New Jersey
Brown, William T. Cleveland Park, D. C.
Brubaker, Howard South Norwalk, Connecticut
Bucek, Mary L. Medford, Massachusetts
Burlingham, Charles C. New York City
Byrns, Elinor St. George, New York
Calkins, Charlotte W. Newton, Massachusetts
Calkins, Mary Newton, Massachusetts
Canfield, H. L. Woodstock, Vermont
Caplan, Frances R. Bridgton, Maine
Capon, Ruth J. Framingham, Massachusetts
Carner, Lucy Ogunquit, Maine
Case, Mary S. Dorset, Vermont
Cattell, J. McKeen Garrison-on-Hudson, New York
Cattell, McKeen Cornell Medical School
Chamberlain, J. E. Boston
Chambers, Robert Cornell Medical School
Chappell, A. W. New York City
Chase, Robert S. Boston
Chase, Mrs. Robert F. Boston
Clark, Sue Ainslee Walpole, Massachusetts
Clement, Sumner Boston
Clumberg, Edith Brooklyn, New York
Codman, John S. Boston
Codman, Margaret Ashland, New Hampshire
Coit, Eleanor New York City
Coleman, Mrs. George W. Boston
Collettireina, Ignacius, M.D. New York City
Collettireina, Marie, M.D. New York City
Collington, D. Philadelphia
Collington, F. Philadelphia
Commons, John R. Madison, Wisconsin
Conant, M. P. Boston
Connell, Dinah Chicago
Converse, Florence Wellesley, Massachusetts
Cook, Waldo Springfield, Massachusetts
Cooperman, Abe Chicago
Cowan, Sarah New York City
Cowing, Agnes New York City
Crouch, F. M. Rye, New York
Cunningham, Helen New York City
Curtis, Isabelle Ashland, New Hampshire
Curtis, W. C. University of Missouri
Cushman, Joan New York City
Darr, John W. Northampton, Massachusetts
Davidson, C. Colorado Springs, Colorado
Davies, Anna Philadelphia
Davis, Anna N. Boston
Davis, Grace D. Hyannis, Massachusetts
Davis, Helen M. Hyannis, Massachusetts
Davis, Janet Magog, Quebec
Davis, Lucy Hyannis, Massachusetts
Davis, Martha M. Hyannis, Massachusetts
Davis, Michael M., Jr. Magog, Quebec
Day, Elizabeth R. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Day, Hilbert F., M.D. Boston
Deardorff, Neva R. New York City
Devine, Edward T. New York City
Dewey, Boris New York City
Dewey, John New York City
Dexter, Smith O. Westport, Massachusetts
Dorsch, Anna Wakefield, Rhode Island
Drake, E. H. Brooklyn, New York
Drew, Medora New York City
Drown, Rev. Edward S. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Drown, Mrs. Edward S. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dun, Rev. Angus Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dunn, O. New Brunswick, New Jersey
Dutcher, Carolene New York City
Dutcher, Elizabeth Brooklyn, New York
Eddy, Sarah J. Portsmouth, Rhode Island
Edsall, Pendleton Kennedy Boyce, Virginia
Elder, E. D. Baltimore, Maryland
Elliott, James W. Duxbury, Massachusetts
Elliott, John Lovejoy New York City
Elliott, Martha H. Duxbury, Massachusetts
Ellis, Mabel Brown New York City
Emerson, Haven, M.D. New York City
Emmons, M. D. Jamestown, Rhode Island
Estabrook, Emma F. Brookline, Massachusetts
Estabrook, Harold K. Brookline, Massachusetts
Farnam, Henry W. New Haven, Connecticut
Farnam, Mrs. Henry W. New Haven, Connecticut
Farnam, Louise, M.D. New Haven, Connecticut
Farr, Albert Madison, New Jersey
Feder, Leah New York City
Feigus, L. Brooklyn, New York
Fenningston, Sylvia New York City
Ferrari, F. New Haven, Connecticut
Field, Mrs. H. H. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Fishelman, B. Brooklyn, New York
Fitch, John A. New York City
Forbes, Howard C. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Forbes, Mr. and Mrs. J. Yonkers, New York
Forbes, J., Jr. Yonkers, New York
Forbes, Mrs. J. Malcolm Boston
Frank, Virginia Chicago
Franklin, Adele Kingston, New York
Freund, Ernst Chicago
Fried, Fanny New York City
Friedman, H. M. New York City
Fuller, Anne C. Greenfield, Massachusetts
Fuller, Elizabeth Greenfield, Massachusetts
Fuller, Mary W. Greenfield, Massachusetts
Fuller, Raymond G. White Plains, New York
Gallagher, Rachel West Lebanon, New York
Gannett, Lewis S. New York City
Gans, Mrs. Howard S. New York City
Garside, M. Poughkeepsie, New York
Gasponi, M. Pittsburgh
Gemberling, Adelaide Princeton, New Jersey
Gibbs, Howard A., M.D. Boston
Gilbert, Dorothea New York City
Gilley, Dr. Southwest Harbor, Maine
Gilman, Dr. J. Brooklyn, New York
Gilson, Mary B. Woodstock, New York
Glusker, Albert Chicago
Gold, Archibald Asbury Park, New Jersey
Goldthwaite, Anne New York City
Goldthwaite, Lucille A. New York City
Goldthwaite, Lucy New York City
Goldwater, Clara A. Huntington, New York
Goldwater, S. S. Huntington, New York
Goodenough, Carolyn North Rochester, Massachusetts
Grady, Alice H. Boston
Grain, V. Brooklyn, New York
Grave, B. H. Wabash College
Green, Ada E. Bridgton, Maine
Gretsch, Laura Asbury Park, New Jersey
Gretsch, Vera Asbury Park, New Jersey
Gruening, Mrs. Dorothy Smith Portland, Maine
Gunterman, B. L. New York City
Guy, Alma I. New York City
Guy, David New Haven, Connecticut
Guy, Florence New Haven, Connecticut
Guy, Seabury New Haven, Connecticut
Hamilton, Alice, M.D. Boston
Hamilton, Edith New York City
Hamilton, Maud M. New York City
Hanson, Eleanor Pittsburgh
Hapgood, Hutchins New York City
Hapgood, Norman New York City
Hardy, May Caroline, Jr. Boston
Hart, Henriette White Plains, New York
Hartshorn, Cora Shorthills, New York
Hawkes, Abigail T. New York City
Hays, Arthur Garfield New York City
Hechtman, Eva Chicago
Heinzen, R. Prang Rockport, Massachusetts
Henken, M. Brooklyn, New York
Hentel, Celia Bridgton, Maine
Herring, Hubert C. Boston
Herwig, Rammett New York City
Herzog, Adrien Blanchard Lenox, Massachusetts
Hicks, Mary Bainbridge, Georgia
Hicks, Mildred Bainbridge, Georgia
Himwish, A. A. New York City
Hirsch, Elizabeth Chicago
Hocking, W. E. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hodder, J. A. New York City
Hodder, Thelma D. New York City
Hodge, H. H. Wyoming, Pennsylvania
Hoffman, Daniel Asbury Park, New Jersey
Hoffman, Daniel, Jr. Asbury Park, New Jersey
Hoffman, Frances Asbury Park, New Jersey
Hohman, Martha New York City
Hollsmith, Elise Danbury, New Hampshire
Holmes, Hector Boston
Holton, James C. Brooklyn, New York
Hooker, George E. Chicago
Hoover, Ellison New York City
Hopson, Elizabeth Fuller Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Hosmer, Katharine East Hartford, Connecticut
Hotson, J. Leslie Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hotson, Mary May Cambridge, Massachusetts
House, Florence New York City
Howland, Harold Greenfield, Massachusetts
Hume, Edward H. New York City
Hunt, Elizabeth P. Haverford, Pennsylvania
Hunt, Irwin Wyoming, Pennsylvania
Hunt, Lydia Wyoming, Pennsylvania
Ingraham, Aimee W. Boston
Ingram, Frances Louisville, Kentucky
Jablonower, Joseph New York City
Johnson, Mrs. Edward J. Winchester, Massachusetts
Johnson, Lillian Springfield, Massachusetts
Johnston, Alice A. New York City
Johnston, Dorothy R. Boston
Just, E. E. Howard University, Washington,
D. C.
Kahn, Dr. Jerome L. New York City
Kahn, Mrs. Jerome L. New York City
Kaufman, Anna New York City
Kelley, Nicholas New York City
Kellogg, Paul U. New York City
Kelsey, Paul H. Brookline, Massachusetts
Kennedy, Luna E. Philadelphia
Kennedy, Marie E. Woodstock, New York
King, Anna Woodstock, New York
Kirshaw, J. E. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Kirshaw, S. S. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Klahr, Emma Whitefield, New Hampshire
Kneeland, Hilda Spofford, New Hampshire
Koenig, Caroline Brooklyn, New York
Koenig, Herman Brooklyn, New York
Kohn, C. Marion Philadelphia
Kohn, Estelle Rumbold New York City
Kraus, Louise H. New York City
Ladd, Ailslie T. Lancaster, New Hampshire
Ladd, Mary E. Lancaster, New Hampshire
Lakeman, Mary R. Swampscott, Massachusetts
Lamonte, C. B. Byefield, Massachusetts
Lancefield, D. E. Columbia University
Lancefield, R. C. Rockefeller Institute
Lane, Lenore Hampton, New Hampshire
Lane, Sarah Hampton, New Hampshire
Lane, Wheaton Hampton, New Hampshire
Lathrop, John Howland, D. D. New York City
Lazar, B. Brooklyn, New York
Lazareff, B. G. Chicago
Lazareff, Elizabeth Chicago
Lazareff, Luba Chicago
Lazzari, Elizabeth Paine New York City
Lee, H. H. Auburndale, Massachusetts
Leonard, Edith North Rochester, Massachusetts
Leroyer, J. Boston
Levy, Clara D. Bridgton, Maine
Levy, David Bridgton, Maine
Lewis, Mrs. Dora Philadelphia
Lockett, Elizabeth Provincetown, Massachusetts
Lofting, Hugh Lyme, Connecticut
Logan, M. A. New York City
Loomis, Miriam M. Boston
Lopas, Gene North Wilmington, Massachusetts
Lopas, Grace North Wilmington, Massachusetts
Lord, Mrs. J. A. Danvers, Massachusetts
Lozinski, M. Brooklyn, New York
MacKaye, Benton Shirley, Massachusetts
MacKaye, Hazel Shirley, Massachusetts
Mackenzie, Jean Kenyon, New York City
McConnell, Elizabeth New York City
McDowell, Mary E. Chicago
McDowell, Pauline Ocean Point, Maine
McLean, F. H. Summit, New Jersey
McLeish, I. Colorado Springs, Colorado
McLeish, Mrs. M. H. Colorado Springs, Colorado
Maher, Amy West Lebanon, New York
Makens, Adelaide New York City
Manship, Grace New York City
Marcus, Grace F. New York City
Marelli, A. Hampton, New Hampshire
Marelli, Maria Hampton, New Hampshire
Marks, Jeannette South Hadley, Massachusetts
Marming, J. E. New York City
Marshall, Charles C. New York City
Matchett, Clara Allston, Massachusetts
Mead, Mrs. George H. Chicago
Melish, Rev. John Howard Brooklyn, New York
Mendel, Philip Cambridge, Massachusetts
Merk, Frederick Cambridge, Massachusetts
Meserole, Darwin J. Brooklyn, New York
Meyer, Dr. Bernard New York City
Miller, Agnes Kingfield, Maine
Miller, Mr. and Mrs. C. S. Westfield, New York
Miller, Jean W. Kingfield, Maine
Millman, Bessie Chicago
Mitchell, Broadus Sweet Briar, Virginia
Moak, Harry New York City
Moak, Rose New York City
Moffet, Edna V. Whitefield, New Hampshire
Montague, William Pepperell New York City
Moore, Edward H. Pequannock, New Jersey
Moore, Madeline N. New York City
Moulton, Phyllis New York City
Mullan, J. M. Philadelphia
Mussey, Mabel Barrows Wellesley, Massachusetts
Mussey, Henry R. Wellesley, Massachusetts
Neill, J. G. New York City
Nolen, John Cambridge, Massachusetts
Norman, C. A. Columbus, Ohio
Norris, S. B. Colorado Springs, Colorado
Noyes, William Leonia, New Jersey
Oleson, Lena New York City
O’Neil, Irene Thomas New York City
O’Neill, Neville New York City
Ormsby, Kathleen White Plains, New York
Otey, Mrs. Dexter Lynchburg, Virginia
Ottman, F. Brooklyn, New York
Packard, Fanny Cambridge, Massachusetts
Paine, Isabelle S. Boston
Parsons, Louis B. New York City
Passage, W. W. Brooklyn, New York
Peabody, Anna May Cambridge, Massachusetts
Peabody, Helen Cambridge, Massachusetts
Peaslee, E. Isabel Medford, Massachusetts
Peaslee, Rachel A. Medford, Massachusetts
Peck, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph A. Middlebury, Vermont
Pholbrook, Alice Hampton, New Hampshire
Plunkett, C. R. New York University
Pohl, Dorothy Chicago
Pollitzer, Anita Charleston, South Carolina
Powell, Mary Lee Cambridge, Massachusetts
Powell, Thomas Reed Cambridge, Massachusetts
Prang, Mrs. Louis Rockport, Massachusetts
Preston, Evelyn Red Bank, New Jersey
Preston, Stuart D. New York City
Price, Ida Wilcox Scarborough, New York
Price, W. T. R. Scarborough, New York
Putnam, Dr. C. R. L. New York City
Raisman, Aaron Brooklyn, New York
Raisman, Emma Brooklyn, New York
Raisman, Victor Brooklyn, New York
Ratner, Joseph Columbia University
Raushenbush, Winifred New York City
Read, Doris Baltimore, Maryland
Read, Edith Baltimore, Maryland
Read, Professor H. F. Baltimore, Maryland
Renbox, Lisa New York City
Robinson, Edith A. Northport, New York
Robinson, Helen New Haven, Connecticut
Rockheimer, Rita Bridgton, Maine
Roewer, George E., Jr. Boston
Rogers, Arthur K. New Haven, Connecticut
Rogers, Helen W. New Haven, Connecticut
Roghe, Hedwig Brooklyn, New York
Roller, Anne New York City
Rondinell, Annina C. Whitefield, New Hampshire
Rosen, David New York City
Ross, Mary New York City
Rudenberg, R. Brooklyn, New York
Saftel, Helen Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Salinger, Dorothy Boston
Sanford, Mary R. Bennington, Vermont
Scheiber, Mr. and Mrs. I. B. Peekskill, New York
Schenk, William New York City
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Schrader, Franz Bryn Mawr College
Schrader, Sallie H. Bryn Mawr College
Schrufro, Mary Bridgton, Maine
Schrufro, Samuel Bridgton, Maine
Schultze, Mrs. Martin Chicago
Scripture, Bertha Lincoln, Massachusetts
Senken, B. Brooklyn, New York
Sessions, Juliette Williamstown, Massachusetts
Shearman, Margaret Hilles South Byfield, Massachusetts
Shurtleff, Margaret Homer Boston
Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury New York City
Skillings, Franklin Peak’s Island, Maine
Smith, Carl E. Hampton, New Hampshire
Smith, Eloise L. Hampton, New Hampshire
Smith, Holmes St. Louis, Missouri
Smith, Mary H. Elizabethtown, New York
Smith, P. Philadelphia
Smith, T. Max Elizabethtown, New York
Solomon, Walter Leo New York City
Sonneck, O. G. New York City
Sosbroke, Hughell Westport, Connecticut
Spencer, Niles Provincetown, Massachusetts
Squier, Mrs. J. E. Boston
Starr, Ellen Gates Chicopee, Massachusetts
Stephens, Louise New York City
Stern, Frances Boston
Stevens, James G. Canandaigua Depot, New York
Stites, S. H. Wyoming, Pennsylvania
Stokes, I. N. Phelps Greenwich, Connecticut
Straub, Mrs. Otto T. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sturtevant, A. H. Carnegie Institution, Washington,
D. C.
Swensen, Edgar New York City
Talbot, Ellen B. South Hadley, Massachusetts
Tannenbaum, Dora Chicago
Tapley, Alice P. Williamstown, Massachusetts
Tarbell, Ida M. Trumbull, Connecticut
Tarbell, Sarah A. Trumbull, Connecticut
Tarbell, W. W. Trumbull, Connecticut
Tarbell, Mrs. W. W. Trumbull, Connecticut
Tauber, Frederick Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts
Taylor, Graham Chicago
Taylor, Lea D. Chicago
Taylor, Lily R. Bryn Mawr College
Teller, Sidney Pittsburgh
Thomas, Francisca Woodstock, Vermont
Thompson, Catharine Boston
Thompson, Christina Princeton, New Jersey
Thompson, Maud Ocean Point, Maine
Thompson, Mr. and Mrs. W. O. New York City
Thurston, Henry W. New York City
Tillinghast, S. M. Wyoming, Pennsylvania
Tine, Maria Chicago
Tolman, Mrs. Henry Salem, Massachusetts
Training School for Jewish Social Work New York City
Trimble, J. K. Philadelphia
Tucker, Mrs. G. Burr Trumbull, Connecticut
Vance, John T., Jr. Washington, D. C.
Vangerbig, Geraldine Red Bank, New Jersey
Van Loon, Hendrik New York City
Van Tuyl, Alverda New York City
Villard, Oswald Garrison New York City
Voce, P. Pittsburgh
Wadsworth, Mary K. Wakefield, Rhode Island
Waechter, Lee New York City
Wales, Marguerite A. New York City
Walser, Igan M. Westport, Connecticut
Walsh, Margaret M. Brooklyn, New York
Walsh, Mary G. Brooklyn, New York
Walther, Elise K. Chicago
Walton, Elizabeth New York City
Walton, Perry Boston
Washington, William M. Detroit, Michigan
Weiss, Rose Ocean Point, Maine
Wells, Frank C. Brooklyn, New York
Wemrebe, Joseph, M. D. Boston
Wentworth, Lydia G. Brookline, Massachusetts
West, Eloise Flushing, New York
West, Walter Flushing, New York
Weyl, Mrs. Walter Woodstock, New York
Wheeler, Elizabeth Ashland, New Hampshire
Whipple, Katharine W. New York City
Whipple, Leon R. New York City
Whitcomb, Camilla G. Worcester, Massachusetts
Whiting, Edith Baltimore, Maryland
Whitmarsh, Alida Edgartown, Massachusetts
Whitney, Professor Marian Parker Poughkeepsie, New York
Wight, Alexander E. Wellesley, Massachusetts
Wilson, Angeline Boston
Wilson, Arthur Boston
Wilson, Dorothy Boston
Windsor, Anna G. Wakefield, Rhode Island
Wingert, Christina Princeton, New Jersey
Wingert, Gustav Princeton, New Jersey
Winson, Ellen Haverford, Pennsylvania
Wise, Helen G. Seal Harbor, Maine
Wittler, Milton Boston
Wolcott, G. S. New York City
Woodhull, William Princeton, New Jersey
Woodman, F. C. New York City
Woods, Amy Duxbury, Massachusetts
Woodward, Helen New York City
Woodward, W. E. New York City
Woolley, Mary E. South Hadley, Massachusetts
Worthington, Louise New York City
Wright, Rowe Woodstock, New York
Wyatt, Edith Franklin Chicago
Zagler, Henrietta Chicago
Zucker, Theodore F. Columbia University
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
The uncertainty in the minds of multitudes of men and women here and
abroad as to the exercise of our American institutions of justice will
make many of the fair-minded, whether conservative or liberal, eager to
read or page through some of the outstanding reports, books, articles
and editorials on the subject.
Among these should be listed: The Lowell and Fuller reports;[19] Felix
Frankfurter’s, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti”; Eugene Lyon’s, “The
Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti”; John Dos Passos’s, “Facing
the Electric Chair”; “The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,” edited by
Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson; “America Arraigned,”
an anthology of poems by some fifty American poets, edited by Ralph
Cheyney and Lucia Trent;[20] in the _New Yorker Volkszeitung_ from
April to the end of August, 1927, will be found in German some unusual
poems on Sacco and Vanzetti by Israel Kassvan; “There is Justice,” by
William Floyd; “Boston” by Upton Sinclair; “The Sacco-Vanzetti Case,”
Transcript of Records of the Case, Henry Holt and Company; and articles
and editorials published in the Defense Committee’s _Bulletins_, in
the _Arbitrator_, _Atlantic Monthly_, _Nation_, _New Leader_, _New
Republic_, _Outlook_, _The Relay_, _Springfield Republican_, and _The
Survey_.
Finally when the Defense Committee has finished its editing of the
compiled Sacco and Vanzetti papers, students of these issues will
have an authoritative body of documents irreplaceable in the Defense
literature. In the meantime both the _Decision of Gov. Alvan T. Fuller_
and _The Lowell Committee Report_ have been reprinted together and
without comment by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. This important
reprint, or any one of the books listed in this note, may be obtained
either from the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, P. O. Box 93, Hanover
Street Station, Boston, Mass.; or from the Sacco-Vanzetti National
League.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Reprints of these reports, also reprints of Sacco-Vanzetti
articles by John Dewey, Arthur Warner, William Thompson and Alexander
Meiklejohn, may be obtained from the +Sacco-Vanzetti National League+,
Room 2008, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York City. +The Sacco-Vanzetti
National League+ is the permanent name of an association which was
hastily formed in August, 1927, through the efforts of Mrs. Jessica
Henderson, and others, to secure from the Department of Justice access
to the files for material bearing on the case of the two men under
sentence. The organization was not successful in this effort, but,
under the chairmanship of Dr. Robert Morss Lovett, it continues to
exist to keep the public informed of developments in the case, which it
does not regard as closed. It has in hand now the preparation of a book
on the Lowell Report, under the editorship of Professor Karl Llewellyn.
[20] The following are the names of the fifty poets included in this
volume:
John Haynes Holmes, David P. Berenberg, Ralph Cheyney, Mary Carolyn
Davies, S. A. DeWitt, W. Wilson Manross, Martin Feinstein, John Gould
Fletcher, Louis Ginsberg, Carolyn Leonard Goodenough, Ernest Hartsock,
Nicholas Moskowitz, Benjamin Musser, Lola Ridge, E. Merrill Root,
Blanche Waltrip Rose, Mary Siegrist, Edith Lombard Squires, Lucia
Trent, Robert Whitaker, Gremin Zorn, W. P. Trent, Seymore Michael
Blankfort, Witter Bynner, Countee Cullen, Babette Deutsch, William
Closson Emory, Harry Alan Potamkin, Ettore Rella, James Rorty, Clement
Wood, Vincent G. Burns, Harold D. Carew, Miriam Allen DeFord, Arthur
Davison Ficke, S. Ralph Harlow, Mary Plowden Kernan, Alfred Kreymborg,
A. B. Magil, Jeannette Marks, Kathleen Millay, Edna St. Vincent Millay,
William Ellery Leonard, Miriam E. Oatman, John Dos Passos, Alice N.
Spicer, Laura Simmons, Max Press, Joseph T. Shipley, Henry Reich, Jr.,
Edwin Seaver, Josiah Titzell, Bethuel Matthew Webster, Jr., Alice Riggs
Hunt.
INDEX
Addams, Jane, 22, 108
Almy, Frederick, 108
_America Arraigned_, 1, 18, 34, 36, 44, 64, 121-122
American Civil Liberties Union, 75, 102
American Legion, 106
Amidon, Judge, 22
Anarchists, hang the, 9, 51;
literature, 51;
Italian, 62;
Chicago, 75;
two philosophic, 102
Anarchy, 41
_Arbitrator_, 122
_Atlantic Monthly_, Attorney Thompson in, 71, 122
Aurelius, Marcus, 74
Austin, Mary, 22
Baldwin, Roger, 103, 104
Barnard College, 97, 98
Barry, John, 13
Beacon Hill, 6, 16, 52
Beale, Fred, 34
Beard, Charles A., 108
Bellevue, 22, 25
Bent, Silas, 88
Berenberg, David P., poem, 1
Berlin, 46
Bernheimer, Louis, 30, 31
Blackwell, Alice Stone, 29
Bliven, Bruce, 108
Bloor, Mother, arrested, 33-35
“Blue Menace,” 97, 106
Blye, Captain, 89
Boissevin, Eugene, 29
Bombs, 4, 11, 19
Boston, 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 18, 19, 20;
Regnant, 26, 43, 52, 55, 56, 58, 68, 75, 81
Boston Common, 16, 26, 52, 56, 57
Braintree, 65
Brandeis, Judge, 19-20
Bridgewater, 65
_Brooklyn Eagle_, 13
Broun, Heywood, 5, 8;
in _Nation_, 69
Brown, Don, 45
Brown, John, 18, 43
Brubaker, Howard, 22
Bryn Mawr College, 97
Buenos Aires, sympathetic strike, 46
Bunker Hill Monument, 26, 34-35
Burlingham, Charles C., 108
Cadman, Dr. S. Parkes, 104-105
California, 33, 102
Calkins, Mary, 98
Callahan, Jack, 88
Cattell, J. McKeen, 22, 81
Chaplin, Ralph, _Mourn Not the Dead_, 95
Charlestown Prison, 6, 13, 36, 40, 47
Cheswick, Pennsylvania, 45
Cheyney, Ralph, Editor with Lucia Trent of _America Arraigned_, 1,
18, 34, 36, 44, 64, 121-122
Christ, Jesus, 41, 81, 92, 94, 98
Citizens’ National Committee, 22
Clayton anti-trust act, 72
Codman, John S., 22
Cohn, Dr., _Some Questions and an Appeal_, 86
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, inward prostration of the soul, 68
Colorado, 45, 75, 85-86
Commons, John R., 22
Communist, 9
Conservative, 71, 81, 94, 101
Cook, Waldo, 22, 23, 25, 106, 108
Coolidge, Calvin, 87;
on _Enemies of the Republic_, 97-100, 106
“Coolidgisms,” 97-99
Cox, Governor, 88
Cox and Harding, vote for, 78
Cremation Chamber, 61
Crowley, Chief of Police, 26, 77
Dadourian, Professor H. M., in _Scientific Monthly_, 81
Dana, H. W. L., Vanzetti’s letter to, 48, 49
Darrow, Clarence, 65
Daughters of the American Revolution, 106, 107
Death House, 6, 13;
back in, 21;
immortality, 24;
farewell in, 31;
_Two in the Death House_, _vide_ Ridge, 33-34;
heard him calling, 41
Debs, Eugene Victor, last money order, 40;
Vanzetti’s tribute to, 65;
straw vote for, 78;
the radical, 79-80;
symbolic figure of, 81-93, 94, 97
Defense Headquarters, 3-8, 10-16, 20, 24-25, 30-32, 35-43, 44, 46-48,
53-54
_Delineator_, article by Calvin Coolidge in, 97-100, 106
Dewey, John, 22;
_Psychology and Justice_ in the _New Republic_, 66-68, 108
Donovan, Mary, 4, 6, 10;
State Factory Inspector, 11-12, 14-16, 20;
standing by her “people,” 28, 29, 30, 31;
Mother Bloor bailed by, 35;
and Powers Hapgood, 37-38, 39;
cry from, 41, 42;
pallor of, 49;
nerves at breaking point, 50-51;
to the thought of, 54;
reading the funeral address, 61-63;
letter, 70-71
Ehrmann, Mr., 89
Elliott, John Lovejoy, 108
Elliott, Mrs., 25
Emerson, Dr. Haven, 22, 108
Emerson Ralph Waldo, 2, 16, 18
Espionage Act, 91
Evans, Mrs. Glendower, 3, 25, 28
Execution, after midnight, the tenth, 2;
official executioner, 13;
at midnight, 83
Farnam, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Walcott, 22
Fascism, fleeing, 42
Federal Council of Churches, 105
Felicani, Aldino, 4, 6, 11, 15-17;
spent figure, 24, 31-32;
it is the ideal, 40, 49, 53, 93
Fellowship of Reconciliation, 105
Fellowship of Youth for Peace, 105
Fiske, John, 2
Flaming Milka (Milka Sablich), lassoed, 85
Floyd, William, _There Is Justice_, 122
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 103
Forbes, Mrs. J. Malcolm, 22
Forest Hills Cemetery, 52, 56, 58-59, 60-63
Foster, William Z., 103
Frame-up, 75-76
Frankfurter, Felix, 13, 24, 102, 103;
_The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti_, 121
Frankfurter, Marian Denman, Editor with Gardner Jackson of _The
Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti_, 42, 48, 121
Free speech and free assemblage, 26, 27, 72, 80, 81, 97
Freund, Ernest, 108
Fuller, Governor, Governor’s Council, 10;
Governor’s Secretary, 14, 15, 23;
cast-iron executive, 31;
plead with, 35;
“Twice the Governor said,” 38;
Secretary’s office, 39;
had assured a woman of wealth, 50;
letter from John Hays Hammond and from Bishop Lawrence, 83, 89;
tuning fork from which he took his pitch, 101
Fuller, Margaret, 2;
kernel of nobleness, 16
Funeral address, 61-63
Galileo, experiment with falling bodies, 80
Gannett, Lewis, 104
Garland Fund, 104
Garrison, William Lloyd, 52
Gary, Judge, advice to his heirs, 91
German, 35
Goldman, Emma, 105
Goodwin, Frank A., address to the Kiwanis, 101-107
Grant, Judge, 2
Hale, Ruth, 8, 26, 32-35;
Bunker Hill Monument, 35
Haley, Lilian, 14;
the friend’s house, 17, 38;
faithful, fearless, 39
Halliday, Paula, 29
Hamilton, Dr. Alice, 23, 25, 108
Hammond, John Hays, letter to Governor Fuller, 83
Hankins questionnaire, 104
Hanover Street, 3, 20, 34, 47, 53, 56, 58
Hapgood, Norman, 22, 103, 108
Hapgood, Powers, testing free speech, 26;
gone, 30;
psychiatric hospital, 31;
account of, 37-38;
defends Mary Donovan, 51;
want to stand up and be counted, 95
Harriman, Mrs. J. Borden, 35
Harding, President, 78, 92
Harvard University, 23, 25
Hayes, Professor Ellen, taken to patrol wagon, 28;
at Forest Hills Cemetery, 60
Hays, Arthur Garfield, 22, 28
Henderson, Mrs. Jessica, Vanzetti thanking, 48, 121
Hendry, Warden, 13;
kindness, 41, 77
_Herald_, Boston, 72-73
Higginson, Colonel T. W., 2
Hill, Attorney Arthur D., 10;
arrow-flight of, 24
Hill, Creighton, 13
Hillquit, Morris, 103
Hocking, William Ernest, 22
Hod Carriers’ Union, 33, 34, 36
Holmes, Dr. John Haynes, 81
Holmes, Chief Justice, 19
Holt, Henry & Co., _The Sacco-Vanzetti Case_, 122
Industrial Defense Association, 107
Italian, 2;
Italian painting, 5;
fruit stand, 10;
can’t speak, 12;
Italian marriage, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 16;
paper, 31;
restaurant, 32;
“wops,” 38;
editor, Signor Longerini, 31, 42;
that Italian case, 43;
martyrs, 50;
by birth, 52;
anarchists, 62;
Vanzetti suffered because, 66;
reference to in _New Republic_, 66-67;
hatred for poor Italians, 74;
radical, 74;
idealists, 75
Jackson, Dr. Edith, 31, 38
Jackson, Gardner, 4, 7, 12;
sacrificing future, 14, 20;
on way to State House, 31;
came in, 38;
more and more quiet, 39, 41;
Editor with Marian Denman Frankfurter of _The Letters of Sacco and
Vanzetti_, 42, 48, 121;
undiminished strength, 49;
defends Mary Donovan, 51;
funeral address written by, 61
James, Edward Holton, 8, 101-102
James, William, nephew of, 101-102
Johannesburg, South Africa, 46
Joy Street Police Station, 28-30
Justice, 2;
_Justice Is the Issue_, 3;
education for, 8, 16-17;
issue of, 26;
“desire for,” 33;
another Brotherhood struggling for, 43;
American Tragedy of Injustice, 52;
Justice Crucified, 53, 55;
spectacle of American, 68;
constitutional, 69;
issue of, 72;
Department of, 75, 84-85
Kassvan, Israel, 122
Kellogg, Paul, 22, 23, 25, 26, 108
Key Men of America, 107
Keynes, John Maynard, 72
Kirchwey, Freda, 98
Laidler, Dr. Harry, 98
Lake Champlain, 1, 43
Langone’s Funeral Chapel, 47, 50-51, 53
Lawrence, Bishop, letter to Governor Fuller, 83
Lawson, John Howard, 22, 33
League for Industrial Democracy, 98
Leipzig, 46
Lenin, Nicolai, 103
Levine, Isaac Don, 8
Lewis, Alfred Baker, 8, 9;
out of police station, 28, 54;
under leadership of, 59;
Salsedo’s highly curious death, 85
Lewis, Dora, 108
Liberal, 71, 81, 94, 97, 100
Lincoln, Abraham, 84-85
Llewellyn, Karl, 121
Lombroso, criminal type, 4
London, protest meeting, 45
Lovett, Dr. Robert Morss, 104, 121
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 2, 77, 121
Lusk law, 86-87;
investigating committee, 102;
days, 107
Lyon, Eugene, _The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti_, 121
McCausland, Elizabeth, _The Blue Menace_, 97, 106-107
MacCracken, President, 105
MacDonald, Herman, _vide_ Fuller, Governor
McConnell, Bishop, 105
McDowell, Mary E., 22
Madeiros, gone, 41
_Manchester Guardian Weekly_, 105
March of Sorrow, 44-63
Massachusetts, 8, 12, 13, 18, 62, 101;
Public Interests League, 107
Maurer, James, 103
Mazzini, grave in Campo Santo, Genoa, 52-53
Mede, James, 88-90
Meiklejohn, A., 121
Michelson, Clarina, 29, 30
Mill, John Stuart, essay _On Liberty_, 27
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 29
Miners, protest meeting, 45;
Colorado, 45
Mooney and Billings, 83, 102
Moore, Fred, 89
Moore, Sam, on Debs, 92
Moors, John F., 23
Mores, 11
Moro, Joseph, 13, 20;
watchfulness of, 49
Mount Holyoke College, 97
Murphy, Carline, 37
Musmanno, Michael Angelo, 31;
as interpreter, 39
Mussey, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R., 22
_Nation_, Heywood Broun in, 69;
“Turn the Light on Palmer,” 84, 122
Nearing, Scott, 103
Neilson, President, 105
New England, 19
New Hampshire, 18, 21
New Jersey, 75
_New Leader_, 59, 83-84, 122
_New Republic_, 8;
miners’ protest, 45;
Dr. Dewey in, 66-67, 122
New York City, 7, 12
_New York World_, 5
Nicaragua and Sandino, 100
North End Park, 53
Oneal, James, drift to Empire, 76-77;
preparation for injustice, 83-84
Oporto, Portugal, 46
_Outlook_, on the fundamental principle of free government, 87;
_Outlook and Independent_, 89-90, 122
Pacifist, 91, 102
Palmer, Mitchell, “Red Raids,” 84, 105
Paris, protest meeting, 45-46
Parker, Dorothy, 9
Passos, John Dos, 8;
cheerful, charming, 25, 28, 34, 35;
_Facing the Electric Chair_, 121
Pasteur, his microscope, 80
Peabody, Helen, arrested, 40
Pearse, Padraic, poem _To Death_, 43
Pennsylvania, 45, 86
Pesotta, Rose, 44, 46;
under leadership of, 59
Philadelphia, 7
Phillips, Wendell, 52
Picketing, 8, 9
Pittsburgh, 45
Police, 2, 3;
rough handling, 9;
bluecoats, 10;
charges trumped up by, 12;
down Joy Street, 28;
to get Mother Bloor, 33-35;
at Charlestown, 36, 40;
and the protestants, 45-46;
Sergeant of, 51;
Mounted State, 54;
at first neutral, 54;
salute to, 55;
control of, 56;
maintain order, 58;
effort to incite to violence, 59-60;
in Cremation Chamber, 61-63, 76
Pound, Dean Roscoe, 103
Prince, Dr. Morton, 66
Professors, 1;
disloyal, 97-98;
Vida D. Scudder, Mary Calkins, 98;
Felix Frankfurter, 102, 103;
Hankins questionnaire, 104
Public opinion, 6;
education of, 16-17
Rabinowitz, Louis, 57
Radcliffe College, 97
Radical, 9, 66, 71, 74-75, 79, 81-82, 84, 86-87, 94, 99
Rand School, 84, 99
Red Menace, 97
_Relay, The_, 60, 122
_Republican, Springfield_, 5, 23, 24, 25, 106, 122
Ridge, Lola, 8, 29, 30;
over in Salem Street, 33;
Charlestown Prison, 36-37
Robinson, James Harvey, on inherent radicalism, 81-82
Roewer, George E., Jr., 22
Roman holiday, 64-77, 80
Romualdi, Serafino, 31, 42
Root, E. Merrill, poem by, 36
Rosario, Argentine, 46
Rotenberg Estate, 47
Sacco, Dante, letter to, 49;
car containing, 53
Sacco, Nicola, 2;
claim the body of, 15;
respite of twelve days, 15;
and Vanzetti, the very best men, 17;
a symbol, 22-24;
lost sight of, 27;
“Save Sacco and Vanzetti,” 29;
justice for, 33;
summons to chair, 36;
“wops,” 38;
in the name of, 39;
walls that held, 40;
Brotherhood of Christ, 41;
letters of, 42, 48, 121;
protest meeting, 45;
bodies of, 47, 55;
farewell, 47;
letter to son, 49;
peace of death, 50;
dead kings, 54;
last deference to, 59;
cremation chamber, 61;
address by, 64;
and Vanzetti are dead, 67, 87-89, 93;
pursuit of ideal, 94;
martyrdom of, 95;
in _Red Menace_, 102
Sacco, Rosa, description of, 5, 6, 7;
waiting for decision, 10-16;
return from Scenic Auditorium meeting, 21;
grief, 24-25;
final appeal to governor, 31, 38;
again waiting, 39;
beauty of, 50;
funeral procession, 53
Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, 1, 7, 13, 15, 16, 19;
fighting on to the end, 21;
bribe, 23;
defeat, 22-24;
when sentence pronounced, 64;
mental courage of Sacco and Vanzetti, 71, 122-123
Sacco-Vanzetti National League, 123
Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Boston, 52, 56
Salem Street, 33
Salsedo, death of, 85
Sandburg, Carl, 78
Santosuosso, Dr., 89
Scenic Auditorium, 21
Schreiner, Olive, 46
Scollay Square, 20, 54, 55
Scott, Dred, 84, 85
Scudder, Vida D., 98
Seager, Henry R., 108
Shields, Art, 8
Shipley, Joseph T., poem, 64
Shurtleff, Margaret Homer, 108
Silva, Frank, 88-90
Simmons, Laura, 30;
sonnet, 44
Sinclair, Upton, 103;
_Boston_, 122
Smith, Alfred, 86
Smith College, 97, 104
Smith, Miss (Winifred?), 97
Socialists and socialism, 7, 8, 9, 11, 51, 86, 92, 93, 98, 101-103,
105
Soviets, ambassador, 97;
government, 99;
Russia, 102
Spanish War Veterans, 106
State House, 6, 14, 16, 31
Status quo, 32, 74, 102
Stratton, President, 2
Sunday, Billy, denouncing the radical, 79
_Survey_, 22, 23, 26, 122
Sydney, Australia, 46
Taylor, Graham, 22
Teeple, Mr., 9
Telephone, calls, 4;
“banks,” State House, 6;
Headquarters, 8;
whistled or faded, 6;
battle, 8;
calling Mr. Thompson, 15, 25, 31;
the ringing voice of Attorney Thompson, 38;
Gardner Jackson, 39, 41;
Mary Donovan, 42;
buzz of, 46
Thayer, Judge Webster, 3;
words spoken by, 50-51;
anarchistic, 51;
Sacco’s reference to, 64;
Vanzetti in courteous apology to, 66;
at Dartmouth reunion, 69, 77
Thirteen days, 26, 50, 68, 71, 81, 95
Thomas, Norman, 104
Thompson, Attorney, 15;
belief in innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, 38;
reference to in _New Republic_, 66-68;
record in _Atlantic Monthly_, 71, 88-90, 121
Todd, Helen, 30
_Traveller_, Boston, _Red Menace_ published in, 101
Trent, Lucia, poem, 18, _v._ also Cheyney, Ralph
Trotzky, Leon, 99
Union Theological Seminary, 99
Vance, John T., 22
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 2;
claim the body of, 15;
respite of 12 days, 15;
and Sacco, the very best men, 17;
a symbol, 22-24;
lost sight of, 27;
“Save Sacco and Vanzetti,” 29;
justice for, 33;
summons to chair, 36;
“wops,” 38;
in the name of, 39;
walls that held, 40;
Brotherhood of Christ, 41;
thanking Warden Hendry, 41;
letters of, 42, 48, 121;
protest meeting, 45;
bodies of, 47, 55;
farewell, 47;
peace of death, 50;
dead kings, 54;
last deference to, 59;
cremation chamber, 61;
speech, 65-66;
Attorney Thompson on Vanzetti in _Atlantic Monthly_, 71, 88-90, 93;
pursuit of ideal, 94;
martyrdom of, 95;
in _Red Menace_, 97
Vanzetti, Signorina Luigia, 20, 31-32, 38, 39, 53
Vassar College, 97
Vermont, 18, 21
Veterans of Foreign Wars, 106
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 22
Ward, Harry F., 99
Warner, Arthur, 121
Watson, Blanche, in _New Leader_, 59
Wellesley College, 28, 60, 97
Wheeler, Senator, 75
Whitney, Anita, 102
Whitney, Marian Parker, 22
Woman’s City Club, 25
Woods, Amy, 23, 28
Woolley, Mary E., 22, 105, 108
_World To-morrow, The_, 90-91
Transcriber’s Notes
Possible printer’s errors, including spelling, hyphenation, and
punctuation, were retained, except for changes listed below.
_Italics_, +Small Caps+ and +ALL SMALL CAPS+ have been converted as so.
Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of their respective
chapters.
On page 21, “justice’” was standardized to “justice’s”.
In the footnote on page 22, “V.” was italicized for standardization. It
means vide, or see.
On page 33, there is a poem with ellipsed text represented by a thought
break. Thought breaks other than this are normal.
On page 67, “mind ...” was changed to “mind....” for consistency.
In the footnote on page 81, “v.” was italicized for standardization.
On page 83, “vew” was changed to “view”.
On pages 88 and 90, “holdup” was standardized to “hold-up”.
On page 89, “Santosuossa” was changed to “Santosuosso” to match other
sources from the period.
On page 91, “felt” was changed to “fell” to match the passage on page
49.
On page 102, “Gospel.” was changed to “Gospel,” since the text is in
the middle of a list.
In the footnote on page 121, “Arthur Warner;” was changed to “Arthur
Warner,” to match the respective list formatting.
In Appendix C, the line breaks and indentation of the list were
standardized.
On page 122, 2 erroneous colons in the list of works were replaced by
semi-colons.
In the Index, the following changes were made:
On page 126, a comma was added after “Professor H. M.” for consistency.
On page 127, a comma was added after “(Milka Sablich)” for consistency.
On page 128, “arrow flight” was standardized to “arrow-flight” to match
the reference in the text.
On page 128, a comma was added after “nephew of” for consistency.
On page 129, “Lusk, Law,” was standardized to “Lusk law,” for
consistency and to match the reference in the text.
On page 130, “Holiday” was standardized to “holiday” to match the
reference in the text.
On page 131, “Santosoussa” was changed to “Santosuosso” to match the
occurrence on page 89.
On page 132, a semi-colon was added to “lost sight of, 27” for
consistency.
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