by Brad Ricca
After her report on Sunny Side was put away on a shelf, Grace did not stay too long in the South. The papers reported on this lady of “prodigious fortune” who used her legal skills toward philanthropy. “Her light has been hid much beneath the bushel,” they said.
* * *
A hush fell over the chamber as the woman in black walked into the marbled room to testify before Congress. It was March 31, 1910, and Grace had been absent from Washington—and from America altogether—for over a year. After leaving the South, Grace had embarked on a long trip abroad. The long details of her trip were sketchy, though there was gossip that she had simply had enough after her troubles in the South.
But Grace was not in Washington for idle gossip or talk about a much-needed vacation. She was there, finally, to give her full report on peonage and immigration. In early 1908, Representative Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana, a lawyer, motioned for the House Committee on Labor to take up the issue of southern peonage. By March, he wanted Grace’s suppressed report released to the committee. By the time hearings were scheduled, it was March 1910. Grace, who had worked on peonage cases for three years, had, for the last year, been traveling through Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece.
In her absence, Crittenden had somehow escaped indictment. For the most part, southern newspapers had dismissed the stories of Sunny Side as Grace’s own failed attempt at notoriety. Percy himself wrote an article claiming that Grace had been “malicious and garbled” in her treatment of Sunny Side and that she had “no experience.” But as the time got closer to her testimony, Representative Clark from Florida again came out swinging against Grace. He called Attorney General Bonaparte a “transplanted bud of alleged French nobility” who employed “a lady bearing the euphonious name of Mrs. Mary Grace Quackenbos, whose field of labor previous” was limited to her own “dear Manhattan Isle.”
Assistant Attorney General Russell testified first. He spoke for a half hour. Grace went next. She spoke for two and a half. She talked about her three years as a U.S. attorney, Sunny Side, her travels, and how immigration needed drastic and speedy reform. She told how employment agents hoodwinked young men into forced labor through false pretenses. She showed how “expert masons were sent to a cotton plantation; boys promised work in a licorice factory were sent to a turpentine camp; a tailor to a mine.”
Grace was dressed in her customary shadows, which contrasted her armfuls of letters, reports, photographs, and books. During her testimony about Sunny Side, John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, who was a member of the committee, listened carefully. He looked at the photographs with great interest. When it came time for questions, Williams commented that though Sunny Side was surely not an ideal place, it did pay wages and did not have some of the physically cruel practices that some of the other southern sites had. Grace thought a moment and responded by reading a list of camp conditions. Mr. Williams felt vindicated; those were the conditions at Robinsonville, he said, a notoriously bad peonage site. When Grace revealed that she had just read conditions from Sunny Side, most everyone in the room laughed.
Grace explained to Mr. Williams that the Department of Justice was not there to make men laugh but “to compel employers to treat laborers fairly.” Their purpose was “not to prevent European labor going to the South, but just the contrary”—to make it work.
After Roosevelt pulled her out of Sunny Side, Grace had not gone overseas just for an extended vacation. She had also gone to uncover the very source of the injustice she had witnessed. She visited every country she could in order to root out these sources of immigration evil. As she listed the ports of call she was received in, some wondered if she had done so under orders. Grace compiled her findings, which she presented to the Senate committee members. Her plan, titled “The Answer to the Immigration Problem,” asked for government regulation and registration of immigrants to move them away from the crowded cities and into jobs in less-developed areas: the part of the Sunny Side idea that was good, but with regulation and a moral foundation.
Grace was frank. She said that “Uncle Sam has been negligent of his new wards” and that the “dark days of the slave trade” had arisen again in the form of the “human vampires” who were preying on their very own countrymen.
“It is a matter of so much a head with them,” said Grace. “They prey upon the new arrivals as soon as they land.” She argued that there should be an immigration employment exchange like they had in Berlin, with a separate department for women. Above all, Grace argued that the immigrants be moved out of the cities they were so magnetically attracted to.
“They don’t know that in the rural districts farmers are crying for help,” Grace said. “In the meantime tenements multiply, congestion ensues, there is no work for the alien and he either becomes vicious, an undesirable citizen, or ekes out a miserable existence amid the mazes of a city that is full of lures for his unsophisticated rural soul.” Dr. Stella, a government advisor on disease, agreed that Grace’s plan would also help alleviate the specter of tuberculosis in the tenements.
For those who thought she was merely agreeing with the Sunny Side experiment, Grace shook her head. “The point is that we Americans are exploiting the aliens,” she explained. “For while our Federal laws are excellent for keeping them out of the country, we show a noticeable lack of interest in them after they are admitted.”
Grace fished around in her folders and held up the card of an employment agent. She read from it: “Any number or nationality of skilled or unskilled laborers furnished. Newly landed foreigners always on hand. New arrivals every week. Kindly call at my office and engage a gang of shortly landed foreigners (Not spoiled from city life).”
Grace ended her testimony with a story that she said was important for the committee to hear. She was in Aquila in late June 1909, in the Abruzzi Mountains of Italy, traveling with Esther Boise van Deman, an American professor of Latin and archaeology with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. It was June 30, 1909. They were just an hour away from Palermo, from where Joe Petrosino was killed a few months before.
While waiting at the Hotel d’Italia for a train leaving Aquila, Grace looked across the way and saw a large poster that read AVISO near the door of an Italian barbershop. Grace walked over and looked at the fine type that mentioned a bank at 60 Mulberry Street in New York.
The sign itself was hard to miss. It was three-by-two feet in dimension and had large words with pink and black lettering. On the other side of the shop window was posted a huge billboard advertising the steerage and second-class passage rates of steamers from Naples to New York on the Hamburg-American Line. That sign was eight feet high and colored red, white, and blue. Both signs were in Italian, though Grace could make out words like “bankers” and “jobs.” She went inside the barbershop.
Grace and Esther entered the shop and saw the barber sweeping up. The man said he spoke no English and Grace said she spoke no Italian. But Esther spoke both. She told the barber that her friend Grace had a friend in the United States—in Arkansas—who was looking for some imported labor.
“Do many of them go over?” Grace asked.
“For a long while, no; but business is picking up again,” the barber said. After a pause where he stared at her, he continued.
“The signora wants to know how it is done—wants to talk with someone who helps laborers to go over.” He patted his barrel chest. “I’m the representante.”
“Are you the representante for the steamship company or for the people who go over?”
“Of the steamship company, but I help the people go over. See here,” he said, walking toward the back.
The barber stepped to the back of the shop and removed a second eight-foot billboard of the Hamburg-American sailings, just like the red, white, and blue sign out on the street. He showed Grace that completely hidden behind it was one of the edicts issued by the Italian government that warned against trusting employment agencies.
“What kind of a thing is that?” asked
Grace.
“Oh, that comes from the government people,” the barber said.
The barber then went over to a cabinet and took out a yellow-covered book of about 250 to 300 pages. The entire book contained, page after page, alphabetical lists of all the small towns in the United States, with their respective counties and states, together with six or seven columns of figures placed opposite the names of the towns extending across the entire page. They could not look too closely because they knew he was going to take it away in an instant.
“If people want to get laborers to work for them in the United States,” asked Grace, “how would they go about it?”
“They could send over the tickets,” the barber said.
“How?”
“Go to the bank. You pay the money, send me the tickets, and I would send over the people.”
Grace told a lie, that a “Mr. Frank” wanted contract laborers to work on his cotton plantation and that, in traveling through the mountains, she and Esther had seen what good workers the Italians were.
“But I don’t see how you agents send them over,” Grace fished.
“A little money for my expenses to find the people.” The barber smiled.
“Do you send women?” asked Grace.
“Yes.”
“I forgot to ask about children. What about them?”
“Oh yes. One can always use them somehow, and they won’t cost much, they’re just trifles, we’ll throw them in for nothing.” He paused. “Very little children,” he said.
Piccoli bambini.
“Oh yes,” he said, “you can use them for a good many things.”
* * *
When Grace was done with her story and the silence gave way to mumbling and paper pushing, she may have looked over to the long table of old men—most of them white-haired and suited—and seen the newly installed senator from Arkansas looking right at her. LeRoy Percy himself had just been elected as a Democrat in 1910. Sunny Side’s boss, who had undercut her with the president of the United States and buried her report, was about to serve on the United States Joint Immigration Commission that would decide whether or not to act on her hard-won testimony. They did not act, at least not in the way that Grace had hoped. At the end of the hearings, Grace returned to New York. She would retreat into her life again. She had done enough. She couldn’t imagine the life of a crime fighter calling her back.
When Grace got back, one of the first things she did was return the coat she had borrowed three years earlier from Martha Bensley Bruere. As Grace sat down to tea, she looked exhausted. She told Martha that she “had no thrilling adventure to relate … her travels were quite conspicuous for their lack of stirring incidents.” Grace looked around, remarking that she did miss the “modern accommodations” of home. Still, she had to admit, “it was a very interesting experience and the knowledge I acquired on this trip I could have gathered in no other way.
“You see,” Grace explained, “I soon found that it doesn’t help the immigrant to jail a few men so long as everybody outside the jail thinking it is good business to keep up the old game. It’s like teaching children that the harm in cheating is in getting caught. We have been prosecuting these peonage cases for more than two years, and yet the traffic in immigrants goes right on. Why, one of the worst offenders had himself elected to the Senate and sits now on the congressional Committee on Immigration to investigate his own crimes! I don’t believe jails ever solved any real human problems, anyway.”
As Grace spoke, she was absently dumping lump after lump of sugar into her tea. She realized her mistake and laughed.
“Oh, do give me another cup,” Grace said, smiling.
Grace paused a moment, sensing that Martha wanted to hear more. “If you saw a child that had been neglected or abused so that it had run away from home, wouldn’t you try to find out what was wrong with the home or the parents? That’s all I did about those immigrants with the whip marks on their backs; followed them into the turpentine camps, from there back to the railroad and steamship companies across the Atlantic, and into their homes. And there I found what was wrong. They were poor, hungry, tax ridden and their Governments didn’t care enough about them to protect them against kidnappers.”
The immigrants who filed into her office were the growing class of poor inhabitants of the United States. Some numbers had the unemployed hovering at three hundred thousand. Every week, more children came to school in rags. And when the teachers and visitors followed these children into their homes, they found bare, dirty, chilly rooms where the little folk shivered and wailed for food and the mothers looked distracted and gaunt.
“You don’t mean they’re kidnapped?” Martha asked, shocked.
“Well, it’s that, practically,” replied Grace. “The whole back country of Italy, Bulgaria, and Greece swarms with agents of the steamship companies who tempt them over with false pretenses of fabulous wealth. Why, one man in southern Greece, nine mule back rides from a railroad station, told me that he had cleared thirty thousand dollars in five years in commission from the steamship companies for luring immigrants to the United States! And right under the nose of the Greek Government!”
Grace sipped her tea, now a little darker and more to her liking.
“For a long time,” Grace said, with deliberation, “we have had runaway immigrants pouring in on us and have tried the man’s scheme of building a high restrictive fence about our country—and then letting them pull off the palings and creep through! Did it ever occur to any of the legal minds that they might step over to a parent State and say, ‘keep your naughty children at home?’ And yet we’ve been doing that very thing.”
After Grace left, Martha wondered if her friend was right in insisting that all the world was a neighborhood. Was she right that it was time to take “the bandage off the eyes of international Justice, lay down her sword, get her mind off the thief and the jail, and become a kindly, intelligent mother to the world?” Martha thought that might not be fair. She thought that law school graduates as a whole “were like too many carrots in a row—they crowd and crush one another, and nobody grows very big. But the women who transplant themselves into new fields grow like everything.” Martha liked that thought very much.
8
The Giant and the Chair
July 1916
As Grace drove up along the east bank of the Hudson, about thirty miles north of the city, she saw Sing Sing prison rising like a pile of stones by the sea. The prison wasn’t tall, not like the buildings she had left behind in New York. There were white structures in the back and a dark tower near the front, all framed by train tracks and wire.
As Grace’s car crossed over the bridge and approached the gatehouse, she went through the unnatural routine of gaining entrance to a prison. She flashed a smile beneath her hat at the familiar faces at the door. Grace had reclaimed her role at the People’s Law Firm. The woman in black had become, once again, a usual sight in unwelcome places.
Grace walked past the exercise yard, and they took her straight to the Death House, a flat, irregular-shaped building floating like an island within the rest of the compound: a prison within a prison, it was made almost entirely of stone. All of its residents were housed in cells with fairly open bars so that the guards could watch them at all times. There were twenty-four cells in total, with room for three men in each. The cells were never empty, though there were always new faces on the Last Mile, which was what the short hallway was called. At the end of the thin corridor was a green door.
Today, Grace was seeing a client named Gennaro Mazella, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of Antonio Castigliano. Mazella had shot him dead on the street in Brooklyn. He pleaded self-defense, but the jury disagreed. Grace was working to commute his sentence down to life based on new evidence that seemed to back up his claim. She had already gotten him two extensions and was confident of a full reduction. After speaking with Mazella in the visiting area, Grace was stopped in the corridor by Spencer M
iller Jr., the young assistant warden at Sing Sing.
“Well, we don’t know about Mazella,” the warden said, shaking his head. “He did kill the man, you know. But if you’re in the saving business, here’s a man we all feel confident is innocent and they’ve convicted him. Take hold of that.” The warden began leading Grace down the hall. A recent graduate of Columbia, Miller worked in the deadliest prison in America—yet he was determined to reform it. He knew Grace from her work with the Mutual Welfare League, an organization seeking to abolish the death penalty. Miller once left the prison two days before a double execution to personally scour a stretch of New York tenements for clues to prove their innocence. He was not successful. But Miller kept trying, with each subsequent prisoner who was sentenced to die. That is why he wanted Grace to meet Inmate No. 66335.
As they walked further down the hall, Miller filled Grace in on the particulars of the case. The defendant was a man named Charles Stielow. He and his brother-in-law, Nelson Green, had been convicted of murdering their neighbor Charles Phelps and his housekeeper, Margaret Wolcott, in upstate Orleans County. The crime occurred in March 1915. There were no witnesses, but Stielow had given a full, signed confession.
Miller stopped in the hallway with an outstretched hand. Grace approached the cell on their right. Inside, there was a cot and a shelf. Grace could only see a glint of a mirror. It was being blocked by a gigantic form of a man, standing with his back to her. He was wearing the dark wool suit that was the uniform of every inmate at Sing Sing. His sleeves and pants looked short. His back was massive and strong.
