XII
During my stay in Boston I paid a visit to Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been in prison at that time for about six years, and whom I had visited not long after his arrest. He was one of the wisest and kindest persons I ever knew, and I thought him as incapable of murder as I was. After he and Nicola Sacco had been executed, I returned to Boston and gathered material for a two-volume novel dealing with their case.
I had developed what the doctor called a plantar wart under one heel, so it was hard for me to walk; but I got myself into a Pullman car, and when I reached Boston I hobbled around the streets with a crutch, talking with everyone who had been close to the case.
I had a story half formed in my mind. Among Mrs. Gartz’s rich friends I had met an elderly lady, socially prominent in Boston; Mrs. Burton was her name, and she enjoyed telling me odd stories about the tight little group of self-determined aristocrats who ruled the social life of the proud old city. Judge Alvan T. Fuller and President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard belonged to that group—and Bartolomeo Vanzetti didn’t. Mrs. Burton had come to California, seeking a new life, and I delighted her by saying that she would be my heroine—“the runaway grandmother,” I would call her.
For my story I needed to know not merely the Italian laborers, who were easy to meet, but the aristocrats, who were difficult. Soon after my arrival, still on a crutch, I read that the proprietor of a great Boston industry had died and was to be buried from his home. It was a perfect setup: a great mill in a valley, the cottages of the workers all about it, and the mansion of the owner on the height above. I went to that mansion and followed the little river of guests into the double parlor for the funeral service. When one of the sons of the family came up to me, I told him I had great respect for his father, and he said I was welcome. So I watched the scene of what I knew would be my opening chapter.
On my way back on a streetcar I was recognized by a reporter from the Evening Transcript, the paper then read by everybody who was anybody in and about Boston. He had come to write up the funeral, and he included me. I shall never forget the horror on the face of a proper Boston couple when I told them of my attendance at that funeral. Maybe it will shock the readers of this book. I can only say that if you are a novelist you think about “copy” and not about anybody’s feelings, even your own. If I were talking to you about that scene, I wouldn’t say, “Was it a proper thing to do?” I would say, “Did I get that scene correct?” When I went back to the little beach cottage, I wrote a two-volume novel in which all the scenes were correct; and the novel will outlive me.
On the way home I stopped at Denver for a conference with Fred Moore, who had been the original attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti, and had been turned away when one of the Boston aristocracy, W. G. Thompson, consented to take over the appeals. Fred was bitter about it, of course, and it might be that this had influenced his opinion. He told me he thought there was a possibility that Sacco was involved in the payroll holdup. He thought there was less chance in the case of Vanzetti. There were anarchists who called themselves “direct actionists,” and Fred knew of things they had done. I pointed out to him that if Sacco had been guilty and Vanzetti innocent it meant that Vanzetti had given his life to save the life of some comrade.
Of course, I did not know and could only guess. I wrote the novel that way, portraying Vanzetti as I had known him and as his friends had known him. Some of the things I told displeased the fanatical believers; but having portrayed the aristocrats as they were, I had to do the same thing for the anarchists. The novel, Boston, ran serially in The Bookman and was published in two handsome volumes that went all over the world.
Just recently I had the honor of a visit from Michael Musmanno, who as a young lawyer came late into the Sacco-Vanzetti case and gave his heart as well as his time and labor to an effort to save the lives of those two men. Being Italian himself, he felt that he knew them, and he became firmly assured of their innocence. Now he has become a much-respected justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; but he still feels as he did, and poured out his soul as if he were addressing the jury of a generation ago. The bitter old Boston judge and the grim governor and the cold-hearted president of Harvard all came to life, and I found myself sitting again in the warden’s reception room at Charlestown prison, in converse with the wise and gentle working-class philosopher named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had sent him several of my books, and he had been permitted to have them; I wish that I could have had a phonograph to take down his groping but sensitive words.